Hello Fellow CSI Members, 

I truly miss the days when a good winter dictated riding a mountain bike, knowing that the European spring cycling classics were going to be muddy and slick and that you could count on regreasing hubs, bottom brackets and headsets on your bicycle a couple of times during the wet season due to the miles logged in the rain. 

Of course there may be a good cyclocross session that will get a rider muddy and cold and remind him or her that it is truly winter time. But winter has not come and it isn’t looking as if we will get a good hard soaking that would turn dirt to mud. 

The real reason I bring all this up is in an attempt to segue (albeit a bad one) into writing about the invention of the bicycle and how concepts like Building Information Modeling (BIM) can clarify the relationship of the components that go into constructing a building. That’s the third segue which is going to be even more difficult. 

The discussion over who invented the bicycle is one thing, the invention itself is another. I was recently reading about some Leonardo da Vinci codes that were discovered in the 1960’s that detail a chain driven device that might have given way to the bicycle had it not been lost or, more likely, not considered relevant. These were from the 1400’s.  Of course it was several hundred years until the bicycle finally made its way onto the roads. And to compare a modern bicycle with the bikes of the 1800’s, one would recognize that they both have two wheels, but that may be about it. 

One thing I have noticed as I look at historical diagrams of the different components of a bicycle is how an old design occasionally gets dusted off and put back on a bike as something new and innovative. I figured that someone was looking at the old da Vinci codes and realized the relevance, 400 years later (of the chain drive), and then surreptitiously squirreled the codes away so that everyone would figure it was an original idea. 

Funny enough, this same thing can occur in construction. I notice it most when trying to maintain an existing building. The information we utilize when trying to make decisions about the building as it currently exists usually come from the plan sets (hopefully) used to build the building. Do they have all the information, was every change documented as an “as built”, where is the guy or gal who originally drew this? Similar to looking through the historical diagrams of bicycle components and noticing the congruency in design separated by years, or decades, looking at a building and wishing there was a congruent record about the structure is something I often find myself wishing I had. 

This is where BIM comes in. The concept of BIM is something many of you may be familiar with already. BIM is seen as a way to look at the complete life cycle of a structure, beyond just constructing the building, but also its operation. BIM builds a multi-dimensional picture of a building and allows information about the building to be extracted as well as modified through the life of the structure. What is anticipated is that less information will be lost when a project is handed off to the Owner or Management Company that will be using the facility and that accurate decisions about asset management can be made years later. 

The idea that this type of information can be gathered on existing buildings or groups of buildings is possible; some constraints do exist, but the feasibility in both expense and accuracy of information gathered would obviously be of concern. Imagine trying to create a model for a building built in the early 1900’s. Some assumptions would have to be made.