Lessons Learned from a Multi-year Initiative to Integrate Data-Driven Design Using BIM into Undergraduate Architectural Education

Abstract

The question of how to best integrate BIM into the curriculum is one of significant debate, especially at the university level. This paper presents the ongoing development of a third-year BIM integration curriculum within an Architectural Science undergraduate program, with a specific focus on a project designed to introduce students to data-driven design. This project has students create a series of massing models in Autodesk Revit, which are analyzed for both initial cost and life-cycle energy performance and these iterations guide studio project development. This paper presents the pedagogical approach developed to introduce students to advanced BIM use cases such as cost analysis and energy simulation and evaluates the first three years of integration of these topics into an architectural curriculum. From 2015 to 2017, over 300 students participated in this project, creating and evaluating over 1000 model iterations. Student feedback obtained through surveys and course evaluations demonstrates that this project is effective not only to provide students with increased BIM capabilities, but also encourage them to synthesize a broad range of data generated through simulation to refine and develop their designs.