Abstract
Despite that Building Information Modelling (BIM) is often praised as a whole life-cycle methodology, possibilities for deconstruction are consistently overlooked. This study demonstrates what those possibilities may be. Previous studies showed that: deconstruction practices pose several site-based challenges; BIM implementations may help practitioners to address such challenges; and activity theory offers a framework to understand BIM implementations. We aimed to explore how deconstruction practices can be reorganised with BIM by applying an activity-theoretical perspective to a rather unique case-study. The selected case concerned the deconstruction of a nursing home so that many of its elements could be reused to construct a school. During this project, we implemented BIM in three essential activities: analysing existing conditions, labelling of reusable elements and planning deconstruction. The implementations resolved initial problems related with the use of traditional drawings, schedules and instructions. They nevertheless also triggered several additional problems that we attempted to address in successive steps. The organisation of the activities so evolved, which culminated in the formation of three new BIM uses for deconstruction: “3D existing conditions analysis,” “reusable elements labelling” and “4D deconstruction simulation”. These concepts complement existing BIM use taxonomies and can be appropriated in future deconstruction projects.
Highlights
Building Information Modelling (BIM) is hardly ever used in deconstruction, even though it is commonly hailed as a whole life-cycle methodology
We aimed to explore how deconstruction practices can be reorganised with BIM by applying an activity-theoretical perspective to a rather unique case-study
The organisation of the activities so evolved, which culminated in the formation of three new BIM uses for deconstruction: “3D existing conditions analysis,” “reusable elements labelling” and “4D deconstruction simulation”
Summary
Building Information Modelling (BIM) is hardly ever used in deconstruction, even though it is commonly hailed as a whole life-cycle methodology. BIM has received a lot of interest in construction research and practice due to promising benefits of the “ideal of having a complete, coherent, true digital representation of buildings” Such a digital representation, or model, could be analysed, priced, interpreted, procured or used in some other way by distinct organisations over different life-cycle stages (Succar 2009, Eastman et al 2011). Penn State’s taxonomy of such use cases defines a BIM use as “a method of applying Building Information Modeling during a facility’s lifecycle to achieve one or more specific objectives” None of the 25 BIM uses identified in this taxonomy pertain to the end-of-life phase. Even though many studies are pervaded with “technocratic optimism” and claim that BIM could bring benefits throughout the entire lifecycle (Dainty et al 2017, p. 696), potential uses during deconstruction appear constantly overlooked
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