Chairs: Claudiu SILVESTRU, Cultural Heritage Integration Lab, Austria | PIOTR KUROCZNSKI, University of Applied Science Mainz, Germany

Description of the session: BIM (Building Information Modelling) is considered by most of the AEC industry (Architecture Engineering Construction) the tool of the future for planning, building and managing constructions. The main concept behind BIM is to make pluridisciplinary work more efficient by storing, sharing, changing and disseminating data over the lifecycle of a building based on a common parametric 3D model. In the case of new building projects this saves time, costs and facilitates coordinated working in complex team structures with different professionals.
For several years now BIM gains importance also for the heritage sector, due to advantages in the documentation, refurbishment and management of historical buildings such as:

  • survey and research results in different formats and from different professionals can be joined in one model providing a solid base for both further research as well as refurbishments and interventions;
  • the BIM-model provides centralized and – if maintained constantly – up to date information on the preservation state of the asset facilitating a better planning of necessary conservation interventions both in terms of timing and costs.

Research as well as case studies have pointed out also several disadvantages of “Heritage-BIM” especially when adopting the approach directly from new building projects, among which:

  • the geometry of historical buildings is generally far more complex leading to modelling problems as well as data storage issues;
  • each building and its element are unique, reducing the efficiency of BIM through re-use of its parametric elements.

This session’s aim is to discuss the challenges and potentials of BIM in building survey, refurbishment projects and the management of heritage sites.

Target Group

  • Building history Researchers
  • Conservators
  • Planners
  • Project developers
  • Managers of heritage sites

Specifics: We invite papers that contribute with insightful and controversial aspects regarding the research and employment of BIM in heritage projects, including but not limited to:

  • methodologies for data acquisition and conversion into BIM-models,
  • software innovations increasing the efficiency of BIM for heritage projects,
  • research on Heritage-BIM standards and libraries,
  • case studies of conservation and refurbishment Projects.