How Nikken Sekkei Uses BIM to Drive Design

 Despite the unprecedented power that Building Information Modeling (BIM) offers architects and designers, most employ only a fraction of its potential. While the typical approach is to treat BIM software as simply the latest means for documenting design, Japanese architecture firm Nikken Sekkei is channeling the latest capabilities of ARCHICAD — the dominant BIM software in Japan, as well as Central and Eastern Europe — to develop an entirely new design process. By running real-time simulations to support collaborative work, utilizing environmental analysis tools to generate building forms, and centralizing project data to effectively implement lessons learned, working methods at Nikken Sekkei resemble a fundamentally different approach to the way architects design buildings.

Nikken Sekkei's collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach to the real-time testing of design iterations for the Toho Gakuen School of Music exemplifies a process that’s both highly efficient and highly intelligent. Given a constricted site in suburban Tokyo, the designers were tasked with the conflicting goals of creating an open, light-filled campus while maximizing the number of sound-proof practice rooms. The resulting design was a dense, multi-level conglomeration of concrete cubes separated by vertical pockets of open space that pierce the building’s floor plates all the way through to the ground.

Making this concept work as a building required an exceptional level of coordination between the project’s architects, structural and mechanical engineers to ensure their respective systems would overlap efficiently and beautifully. To do so, much of the design work occurred in collaborative sessions where potential conflicts were identified in ARCHICAD and replaced with new solutions that were tested in real time during the working sessions.