The Rosewood experiment — Building information modeling and interoperability for architectural precast facades

The Rosewood experiment examined building information modeling (BIM) and product data exchange in the design and fabrication of architectural precast façades. The façade panels of a 16 story office building were designed and fabricated using traditional CAD, while a parallel workflow was performed independently using BIM tools. No limitations were encountered in designing and detailing of precast façade pieces with current software. Production of the same set of drawings showed a productivity gain of 57% over the CAD process. However, the data exchanges between architectural and precast engineering systems were incomplete and inconsistent, confirming the need for BIM exchange standards. The existing Industry Foundation Classes schema (IFC version 2x3) lacks precast-specific entities and property sets. The majority of the difficulties can be traced to a loss in translation of semantic meaning for the objects exchanged.