有关BIM的四本经典图书速览

If you happen to go to Amazon.com and search for books on BIM, the total number of results is 980. (This was the number for a search conducted on Oct 29, 2012—no doubt, the resulting number could be different for a search conducted at another time.) While this may not seem like such a staggeringly high number—and if you dig deep down in the results, some of the titles may not be books on Building Information Modeling but on some other “bim” (for example, one of the books is on “bee-bim bop” which is a traditional Korean rice dish)—it does point to the fact that an increasing number of books on BIM are being published for AEC professionals. I personally have received several BIM books for review, and while there were too many of them for me to publish a dedicated review of each, this article provides a brief overview of each book. Most of these are among the top books in the field and appear on the first page of the Amazon.com results window for the search described earlier. While there are an increasing number of "how-to" books focused on individual BIM applications such as Revit, ArchiCAD, and so on, all of the books described in this article are general books that attempt to provide a more theoretical and broad-based understanding of the BIM phenomenon.

BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers and Contractors

This book by Chuck Eastman, Paul Teicholz, Rafael Sacks and Kathleen Liston remains the seminal book on BIM for the AEC industry, topping Amazon.com’s search list of BIM books. It was first published in early 2008 and was reviewed in AECbytes towards the middle of that year. Last year, a second edition was published, which is the one available now. Authored by a highly distinguished set of BIM experts who are very active in academia, research, and the industry, the BIM Handbook aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the technology and processes behind BIM, the business and organizational issues associated with its implementation, and the advantages that effective use of BIM can provide to all members of a project team, including architects, engineers, contractors and sub-contractors, construction and facility owners. The book is targeted towards both practitioners in the industry as well as students and researchers in academia. For practitioners, it provides not just a deeper understanding of BIM but practical information including the software applications that are available, their relative strengths and limitations, costs and needed infrastructure, case studies, and guidance for successful implementation. For students and researchers, it provides extensive information on the theoretical aspects of BIM that will be critical to further study and research in the field.

The second edition of the BIM Handbook keeps up with all of the rapid advances in BIM technology and associated processes since the first edition was published three years ago, including new BIM tools and updates to the existing tools, the growing availability of model servers for BIM-based collaboration, the increasing focus on extending BIM technology all the way through to facilities management, the growing use of BIM to support sustainable design and lean construction, the integration of BIM with technologies such as laser-scanning to capture as-built conditions, and the growing momentum of alternate delivery models such as IPD. The second edition also greatly expands upon the case studies section of the first edition, highlighting several new projects that have pushed the boundaries of BIM use to achieve exceptional results, both in signature architecture as well as more common building designs. Given the scope and extent of the material covered, it is hardly surprising that the BIM Handbook continues to be highly regarded as one of the most comprehensive and authoritative published resources on BIM.

Amazon Link

The Impact of Building Information Modeling: Transforming Construction

This book comes from Ray Crotty, who is the founder of the UK-based C3 Systems, a consulting firm that helps organizations develop and implement information management strategies on capital projects. He was previously head of IT with the UK construction management firm, Bovis, a founding member of the UK chapter of BuildingSMART (formerly IAI), and is a member of the UK Government’s BIM Strategy Working Group. Given his background and expertise, this book provides a much-needed look at what is happening with BIM in the UK, as opposed to the typical US-centric discussions on BIM. It also has the advantage of being fairly up-to-date on recent BIM developments, as it was published just about a year ago. These include the acquisition of Navisworks by Autodesk; its interoperability agreement with Bentley; the emergence of Digital Project as a high-end BIM solution resulting from a collaboration between Dassault Systèmes and Frank Gehry’s architecture firm; the launch of Autodesk Seek for BIM content and its collaboration with McGraw-Hill Construction, developer of the Sweets product catalog; and a near-accurate listing of the main BIM authoring solutions for architecture, structure, and MEP engineering (with the exception of Bentley’s integrated BIM solution, AECOsim Building Designer, which was released only earlier this year).

By virtue of being UK-based, Crotty’s book provides an insightful look into the early research on AEC CAD—which was the precursor to modern-day BIM—a lot of which was done in the UK; a discussion of European BIM solutions such as ArchiCAD and Allplan; and the use of Bentley’s GenerativeComponents to design high-profile projects such as the Swiss Re “Gherkin” building in London. There is also an extensive discussion of the background and current state of the UK construction industry. Above all, however, the focus of this book is on how the “digitized construction” in the building industry enabled by BIM will fundamentally transform it, generating a much higher quality of information about the building, and ultimately enabling an end-to-end transmission of computable data throughout the industry’s supply networks. The change will be akin to the “digital revolution” that is transforming all other industries, similar to the agricultural and industrial revolutions that shaped early eras of human history. What we can look forward to with BIM is “building with perfect information”—which is also the focus of Ray Crotty’s Viewpoint article in AECbytes that was published earlier this year.