Mathias P Nilsson is a lucky man. He works in probably the best project room I have ever seen. It’s like the result of an interior designer’s perfect brief. On the one wall is an interactive screen running Solibri Model Checker. The remaining walls have monitors, and traditional date boards covered in different colored sticky notes. It certainly gives the sense of a well-ordered project HQ. It also overlooks the current construction site for the new SEB bank office complex in Solna, Stockholm. This complex will be a combination of 3 large office blocks.
Mathias is Veidekke’s VDC engineer. He co-ordinates BIM information management for the current bank project. He studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. He did his senior thesis with Veidekke and went to straight to work for them after graduating. Veidekke is a Norwegian construction company with projects throughout the Nordic region. We took time to interview Mathias between project meetings.
“Anyone who has dealt with a large-scale BIM project will tell you the amount of information you need to keep tabs on is overwhelming. To do that without Solibri is impossible if you want any kind of assurance that what is being delivered is what has been agreed upon.” Tells Mathias.
“In the design phase, it is often chaotic and hard to foresee the risks that are being designed into the building. With Solibri, you are able to eliminate clashes between installations. In the last two projects where we ran Solibri, we have had zero installation clashes on production sites. It’s hard to say the value of that in financial terms but it’s safe to say if definitely saves money.” Mathias continues to explain how Solibri offers him all round visualization in the design phase.
“The Project you see through the window is for SEB. They are consolidating their offices with a planned completion date in 2018. When ready, it will house 4-6000 employees. For this project, our design team publishes new IFC files on a weekly basis. We then put these models through Solibri Model Checker to check for clashes and to do a visual run through before the next meeting.”
Mathias shares his thoughts with us regarding BIM and the industry as a whole. He believes the term ‘BIM’ is misleading as it means different things to different people. He prefers VDC (Virtual Design Co-ordination) as he feels it encompasses more than merely a ‘flat 3D model’ which some feels is not as useful as once hoped. Moving towards the future, I am interested to hear what Mathias sees for the industry. The cloud is something that will continue to integrate into Mathias’ world. He sees it as the easiest way for multi discipline projects to come together when sharing huge file sizes. He also sees environmental issues playing a larger role in everyone’s consideration. “I read the heating of buildings consumes 50% of used energy. Lighting accounts for approx-imately 25% of the remaining consumption. Anything we can do to help efficiency has a massive consequence all over the world. Our work can play a part.”
With that we say goodbye. Mathias has another project meeting and we take some stills of this project ‘war room’ for when we edit a film of this interview. I look forward to catching up with Mathias and Robert Priller of Graphisoft Sweden in the near future. Solna, Stockholm is one busy place for construction at present.
