Big and Small Down Under: Architecture firm working on multi-billion-dollar Queens Wharf and Sunshine Coast City Hall, among many others.
Nemetschek has sponsored this post.
Cottee Parker Architects doesn’t just design buildings, they design districts. The company is currently a leading firm in one of the world’s largest construction projects, Queen’s Wharf Brisbane in Queensland, Australia.
Around since 1989, the firm specializes in architecture, interiors and master planning with offices in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and recently the Gold Coast. The firm is an avid user of BIM [building information modeling] solutions. These include Archicad, dRofus, Solibri Office and Bluebeam Revu, all representing the portfolio of one of the global construction software leaders, the Nemetschek Group.
Cottee Parker uses a data-driven approach, where they rely on information to drive the design process and ensure all stakeholders can easily access the data in one central location when they need it, and in the format they need it. This falls in line with Nemetschek’s vision that BIM is all about the information—or, at least, that is what it should be.
Nemetschek believes the “I” in BIM—information—is the most important aspect of a project, which goes hand in hand with a concept they are calling Building Lifecycle Intelligence, where the building data follows a data scheme that can be utilized across different software applications and non-graphical data drives the entire value chain.
“Building Information Modeling, as the name implies, should be all about information. But the reality looks quite different—most BIM processes are centered around model-based workflows,” said Viktor Várkonyi, Chief Division Officer, Planning & Design Division and member of the Executive Board of the Nemetschek Group.
A model-based approach implies that models are designed based on certain requirements, then data is generated and validated. Model handovers, however, often generate data loss and lead to errors. “Especially for large and complex projects, this approach is far from being efficient. But if we instead focus on the data itself and organize this data at a central point for all stakeholders to access, a smooth process can be guaranteed,” Várkonyi added.
A good example of a data driven approach that combines BIM and Building Lifecycle Intelligence, according to Várkonyi, is the Queen’s Wharf project. More on that later in this article.
We spoke with Cottee Parker to learn more about their BIM approach and lessons learned, and how Nemetschek helps them solve their design challenges.
Cottee Parker often finds themselves in a dual role as lead architects and BIM managers. We chatted with Quinton Cooper, Associate, BIM and digital engineering manager at Cottee Parker Architects about how they manage both these roles.
Cooper has been with the firm for almost five years and is a highly ranked presenter at national and international technology conferences. He has provided training to hundreds of design professionals for more than a decade. He has been using ArchiCAD software for close to 15 years, and worked for Graphisoft Australia as a training and support consultant.
At Cottee Parker, Cooper is responsible for the development and support of BIM and digital engineering systems where he leads his team of seven and weighs in on all projects across its five offices. Right now, he is mainly focusing on the Queen’s Wharf and Sunshine Coast City Hall projects, which we will discuss in detail.
“We are very fortunate to have senior technical leaders in each office that provide valuable support, as the volume of what we are dealing with is certainly too much for a single person to deal with effectively,” said Cooper. “I believe we have one of the best technical teams in the world. I’m also directly involved in the Queen’s Wharf Project, the clash detection and model auditing for Sunshine Coast City Hall and a number of other projects where Cottee Parker is engaged directly by the client as the BIM Lead.”
The firm engages in a lot of in-house programming and customization of the software they use, so flexibility is important to them when choosing software solutions.
“I think this flexibility is why we have gone with the Nemetschek products,” said Cooper. “Solibri, which we use for the clash reviews, allows us to write a lot of rules. We use the Solibri rule sets, but we customize them to suit the project.”
“A lot of the other architecture tools don’t really have that capacity. That’s why we have gone down that path. The same thing applies to Archicad as the authoring tool,” he added.
Cooper’s team is self-taught in the area of programming. Archicad enables them to do a lot of programming natively, which saves them from hiring a programmer or developer.
“The programming language within the software is quite easy to use, and the customization is important to us,” he said. “We like software that allows us to configure it to work with each project in the optimum manner.”
Another challenge that Nemetschek products help Cottee Parker with is making sure the right project stakeholder gets the right information at the right time.
While he is heavily involved in the Queen’s Wharf project, which will be in construction beyond 2024, the Sunshine Coast City Hall project is also a key focus, as it is currently moving into construction.
Nemetschek software was also used on the Sunshine Coast project. This project is very near and dear to Cooper. It is about an hour from the house where he grew up—and is home to some of the world’s finest beaches, he said.
Positioned within Maroochydore’s new Central Business District, Sunshine Coast City Hall is over 10 stories tall. The project takes a different approach to a government building with a vision to create a building that represents the region and its climate, building on beauty and civic significance. By the looks of it in the picture, it certainly captures that and definitely has more of a campus or apartment building feel than a traditional government office.
Building Australia’s $3.6 billion megaproject with Nemetschek Group.
The Sunshine Coast project has about 10 different firms working on it, and so Cooper’s focus is on reviewing the work of the different disciplines. This is where clash detection, model data and services coordination play a key role.
“It’s a very densely populated building in terms of the services that we have to get up from the basement all the way through the tower. There are a lot of tight areas that take carefully orchestrated coordination to align everything,” said Cooper.
But then also because it is a government project and they are handing the model over to a client at the end of the day, there is a data requirement. They have to stage the delivery carefully so that they are focused on the right part of it at the right time, all while making sure that people are on track for data delivery as well.
The Sunshine Coast project is a good example of the importance of the “I” in BIM as it is a complete BIM model. Everything has been modeled for all disciplines, even down to the landscape. Cooper said not only is the geometry important, but the information in the BIM model is also key, “because without the information the clash detection tools can’t really assess the validity of the clash. If you put a heap of geometry through a clash detection review, you often get 1,000 items coming out of the report. There are some things that are expected to clash. We needed to write additional rules to allow clashes in certain circumstances. There’s a lot more involved in it than simply just geometry intersecting. The classification of the item and the information about it really helps us write those rules.”
Though he comes from an architectural background, Cooper said he has always been more interested in the master planning aspect.
“When I was younger, I enjoyed design and documentation work on hospitals and prisons and other institutional projects that were very prescriptive in their outcomes, and which had a very clearly defined brief,” he explained. “I liked the idea of understanding what the rules were and what we could do with those rules. Now that we are working more in hospitality, casinos and other projects that are less institutional, we in the technical team still tend to apply the same logic. We look for what the rules are. We look for what the software can do and what a human can do, and we try to marry that together. The programming comes from necessity.”
Regardless of scale, Cottee Parker applies the same design and information management principles across all projects with a scalable approach to suit the application. The Queen’s Wharf project spans about six city blocks and will feature five new hotels including Ritz-Carlton, 50 restaurants and bars, a riverfront cinema, 12 football fields of public space and nine heritage buildings open to the public, some of which will be restored.
The project began in 2016, demolition of previous structures was done in 2017 and development will continue into 2024 when two more towers will be added.
Destination Brisbane Consortium is in charge of the $3.6 billion Queen’s Wharf development. When completed, the site is expected to draw in close to 1.4 million tourists and provide 8,000+ jobs. It is the largest construction project in Queensland. At peak construction, it will employ nearly 2,000 people.
To begin the Queen’s Wharf, renovation engineers undertook the largest demolition and construction scheme ever attempted in central Brisbane. Almost half a million cubic material was removed, the most ever recorded for an inner-city project in Queensland. Much of the material removed is being reused by the Brisbane airport for reclamation work and to help build what will be Australia’s first automotive precinct.
As you can imagine, building a new district of this scale alongside a river while preserving the historic buildings in a city center can be extremely challenging.
Cottee Parker embraced a digital collaboration to plan and coordinated the vast amounts of design data working in an information modeling environment and employed 16 different software tools across 39 contributing companies from architects and engineers to contractors and suppliers.
Of the 16 solutions being used on the project, Cottee Parker is using four of Nemetschek’s brands for planning to operation. They use Archicad for the design, dRofus for data management, Solibri Office for model checking and Bluebeam Revu for the comprehensive digital documentation.
Information modeling allows the Cottee Parker team to organize all of the project’s key information in an easy to access central place where the 3D models, data and specifications can be kept and coordinated by the team in real time.
The information modeling approach not only increases efficiency and understanding of the project, but also cuts waste.
Archicad has been used for the design stage where integrated design has been implemented so that architects and engineers are able to review and check the same models in real time to gain an understanding of each other’s intentions and detect errors before they occur on site. Archicad’s openBIM compatibility enables models not designed in Archicad to be brought in and coordinated in Archicad as well.
Plus, Nemetschek software helps Cottee Parker get the most out of each step of the way, without disturbing the workflow, which is important to help team members stay focused. For example, Solibri was used to check design information for errors before it was issued to the contractors on site.
Aside from ensuring information is correct, finding and getting access to what users need on a project of this size can be challenging, especially on site. Making sure everyone can easily access and open what they need is crucial.
With Bluebeam Revu, Cottee Parker has saved the team from having to navigate through thousands of physical documents by enabling a digital, paperless workflow. This has cut the time spent reviewing drawings by a staggering 50 percent, while decisions involving multiple stake holders have been made more quickly as even newcomers to the software can pick it up easily.
A paperless workflow is certainly a priority at Cottee Parker and Bluebeam has helped with that. Cooper said that although they have used Bluebeam loosely in the past, Queen’s Wharf required a very structured approach since they had to coordinate a fairly large team.
When Bluebeam was brought into the practice, it was easy to pick up, and so a lot of teams started using it. They used it to manage the workflow for the teams. They’d have senior team leaders marking up documentation and assigning tasks for the day or week.
“We got to the point where we were not printing out drawings anymore, even on the billing side. On site, nearly everything is on an iPad,” said Cooper. “People aren’t printing on paper.”
“It changed the way we document,” Cooper added. “Traditionally, when working on a building design you would have the building on the center of the page in front and all the dimensions around the edge of the page. Whereas now, people have the information live on an iPad where it’s updating frequently.”
“The use of devices onsite gives the end user the ability to interrogate the information in more detail, which has had unexpected impacts on industry standards even down to the positioning of annotation. We introduced coding and annotation standards that reflect this use as a result of the feedback coming from the construction site. For me, this is part of the fun. It’s constantly evolving. You get those loops of feedback and responding to them really forces innovation,” Cooper added.
A megaproject such as Queen’s Wharf can involve 10,000 times more documents than would normally be used on a domestic building. Digital engineering specialist, DBM Vircon, is also using Nemetschek products on Queen’s Wharf, and has over 340 models under management and is processing 215 individual models each week.
dRofus was used to help Cottee Parker process their data, helping to consolidate the huge amounts of information coming in from multiple sources, keeping it in one place and allowing users to easily access and edit it when needed.
dRofus was new to Cottee Parker, introduced midway through the project. Ideally, dRofus would be used at the beginning as a briefing tool for the client. Cooper said this proved to them it could be brought on to a job at any stage. At Cottee Parker, it was used less as a briefing tool and more as a data capture tool for this project because they had developed systems within ArchiCAD that structured the data in such a way that it would feed into almost any other software. Overall dRofus was reasonably straightforward for them to implement and usable in getting the information they needed for the client.
At this point the Cottee Parker team is motoring toward their goal of completing the core elements in 2022 and renovating the sites history in 2024. While information modeling is essential in the design and construction phases, Nemetschek believes it will play an even greater role once Queen’s Wharf is completed, helping to manage and maintain the new district enabled by the technology.
The software tools Cottee Parker uses must have the ability to be customized or Cooper’s team has little interest in them. They have had a long-standing relationship with a lot of the Nemetschek brands where they have been fortunate in many cases where the Nemetschek team will come to Cottee Parker to get their input on the development of their software.
“If a software developer develops something for us, it’s done in a way that it benefits everyone in the industry. From there, we can take the solution and expand and expand on it with our own customization,” said Cooper.
“There’s only so much you can expect from each product. Part of taking a lead role in BIM is accepting that there has to be some sort of customization that is bespoke for your practice.”
To learn more, visit Cottee Parker and Queen’s Wharf Brisbane.