Vienna House — an affordable rental housing demonstration project in East Vancouver — will help BC Housing evaluate promising materials, strategies, and processes to advance solutions to affordability, climate change, and social equity challenges.

As the owner’s BIM consultant, Summit BIM provided project-specific BIM leadership and guidance. We worked with BC Housing to:

• Develop the BIM Specification establishing the requirements for all parties.
• Undertake model audits to ensure compliance.
• Provide a common data environment — BIMFMi®  — to enable the collection and linking of all data and documents required to support a digital handover for facilities, maintenance, and operations.

“Improving the predictability and reliability of construction projects by establishing a set of BC Housing standards is key to improving the affordability and sustainability of our housing projects,” says Denisa Ionescu, Senior Manager, Research & Education, BC Housing. “By establishing the BIM requirements before even design is involved, we have a unique opportunity to define what data will be tracked at the outset, to create a robust cost versus benefit model, and to record and publish our processes.”

“Adopting a BIM strategy that focuses on generating and reusing information is one of the most exciting parts of this project,” says Geraldine Rayner, Managing Principal, Summit BIM. “Using BIM allows the design to stay in 3D all the way through the project which improves design quality and building performance, mitigates risk, and reduces cost. It is great to see a Passive House team embrace the benefits that BIM has to offer.”