Historical building with modern tools
The engineering consultants Bau-Consult Hermsdorf GmbH were responsible for planning the precast elements for the modern façade of the new Berlin City Palace. For this complex task with challenging demands placed on creative design, the company selected the BIM software Tekla Structures, in combination with Trimble SketchUp.
Trimble SketchUp was used here for combining the elements belonging to one building group into one item. This item can then be incorporated as an unchangeable element in the Tekla Structures model. This grouping reduces the number of elements to be administered by the model data base in Tekla Structures, resulting in great time savings in work with this model.
Reduction of 90 % in the number of elements in the BIM model
In designing the façade of the Berlin City Palace, this procedure was especially expedient, since many building groups were frequently used in identical form. This saved the designers time and avoided errors that are easily prone to occur due to faulty copying and inputting, or to reworking of already integrated building groups. For the Berlin City Palace, BCH created several different items in SketchUp, including embedded and erection parts as well as various geometric shapes of the façade elements. This resulted in reduction of around 90 % in the number of elements in the BIM model; extrapolated to the overall model, this amounts to approx. 180,000 elements in Tekla Structures. This made the size of the model considerably leaner and simplified model handling.
