Project Description
Restructuration of an historic building in offices
Client
Confcooper Società Cooperativa
Project team
Task
BIM modeling and BIM coordination
Energetic performance
Classe G
Gross area
3.530 sq m
Budget
5.680.715€
Photos Credits
Francesco Mattuzzi
The project for the offices of the new headquarters for Confcooper involves the restoration of an historical building in the consolidated fabric of Rome, at 153 Via Torino. The building dates from the end of the nineteenth century and rises over six floors with a total surface area of about 4,000 sq m. The project requires finding a balance between the different periods within the building, creating a dialectic between original and contemporary.
This heritage restoration and development provided the occasion for research and experimentation using the BIM approach.
The initial phase of works involved taking a laser scan survey of the entire building. The point cloud obtained gave a precise model of the state of affairs with the function of archive of existing conditions and to be used as the basis for an intervention made on an accurate model. Further information was added to the model’s geometric components such as: images of facade degradation, current fixtures, structural state and images relating to the various tests carried out in view of the changes.
The usefulness of the BIM model emerged for example when the sum of the situation was drawn up. Indeed, the details extrapolated from the model were more correct than those belonging to the administration, providing a better document and an improved evaluation of the space.
So the project was outlined on the basis of an acquired model, contemporaneously maintaining two distinct phases: current state and projected state. In this way, it was possible to draw a constant comparison between “before” and “after” with no dispersion or loss of information. Furthermore, it is worth underlining that modelling all the disciplines involved - architectonic, structural and MEP - guaranteed the possibility of judging the feasibility of the project on all the different levels of analysis not only in order to eliminate interdisciplinary interference, but also and above all with the aim of carrying out a type of project that did not alter the consolidated identity of the building but brought value to it in its specificity. For example, due to this coordination between various models, from the start plausible passages for plant were identified that did not interfere with load-bearing walls and that avoided contamination with the historical facades.
Contextual to the project’s formal aspect, thanks to the inter-operability of the various platforms involved in the workflow, it was possible to plan the measurement of all aspects, such as economic and comfort, which informed various design choices. Information contained in the models was continually extrapolated, on the one hand to measure the quantity of materials to be distributed within the work schedule, carried forward with the Presto platform, and on the other, to export information in order to arrive at an MC4 platform, where the calculations were made and hence the various plant elements sized up with aim of guaranteeing the comfort parameters allowed for by Law 10, maintaining high energy efficiency in line with the principals of sustainability.
To obtain correct measurements the models needed all the necessary geometric and relevant information, for which Visual Scripting was used. Since it is an historical building there were non-standard and non-prefabricated architectonic elements, whose modelling “complexity” through Revit was aided by Dynamo, making it possible to model and manage with greater ease components such as vaulted ceilings and drop ceilings made up of numerous series of struts. Dynamo was also the support used for the organization and completeness of metadata associated with elements so as to guarantee the inter-operative flow described.