BESIX and Vanhout gained distinctions in each category of the 2018 BIM Awards, confirming once again the Group's leading position in the Benelux. Congratulations to all teams involved in these projects!
The BIM Awards 2018 ceremony, honouring the best BIM projects in the Benelux, was held in Brussels on 4 December. BESIX and Vanhout took three awards, two gold and one silver, in the three competition categories: Infrastructure, Public Projects and Tertiary Projects. The winning projects are, for BESIX, the BNP Paribas Fortis headquarters building and the Leopold II Tunnel, both in Brussels, and for Vanhout, the Centrum-Zuid residential care centre at Merelbeke, near Ghent.
BESIX, along with its partner Eiffage, took the first prize (Gold) in the category "tertiary, industrial, commercial and residential projects" for the BNP Paribas Fortis headquarters building on the Montagne du Parc.
"From the beginning of the project, using the BIM methodology, BESIX and its partner have opted for a method that closely associates the owner, the designer and the contractor to optimize the entire process, from drawing board to the completion of the building. The new headquarters building, with 5 underground levels and 7 above-ground floors, has room for around 4,500 workstations, with a gross built area of more than 100,000 m². Major technical challenges: the building includes a huge 14,000m³ water storage basin over 2 basement levels for thermal energy regulation, as well as an exoskeleton consisting of nearly 1,000 columns on the façade, no two of them alike", explains Thibault Leroy, Project BIM Coordinator at BESIX.
For nearly two years now, the BIM coordination and the construction site have been operating in parallel, with completion scheduled for 2021. The BIM & Synthesis team was rewarded by the organizers for its work on integrating and applying innovative BIM technologies at every stage of the project. The prize board was keen to highlight the achievement of setting up - with nearly 80 digital models and a palette of almost a dozen BIM software programs - a "complex and innovative BIM ecosystem that optimizes the coordination process."
For the Leopold II Tunnel renovation project, presented in the "Infrastructure Projects" category, a Silver Award went to the Circul2020 consortium of BESIX, Jan De Nul and Fabricom.
This major engineering work, involving a strategic road axis at the centre of the Brussels Region, is undergoing a major renovation, in a particularly densely built and constraining immediate surroundings. In this context, including the fact that the work is carried out exclusively at night, the BIM has helped reconcile demanding objectives in terms of organization, security and anticipation, while minimizing risks.
"Before starting the work, the survey of the existing situation was crucial," explains Fréderic Pierre, deputy manager of the BESIX technical team. "A 3D scan was undertaken of the entire tunnel, including emergency exits and technical facilities. From this cloud of points, digital models of the existing situation were developed. The design and coordination of the work was enormously facilitated by the proven reliability of the 3D models."
As for Vanhout, the company outperformed all its competitors in the "Public Projects" category. The Centrum-Zuid residential care area at Merelbeke, in the Ghent region, won the Gold Award.
"In collaboration with the Xella company, we presented a particularly ambitious digital approach, taking BIM to the site with virtual images and holograms", explains Chiel Beckers, BIM Coordinator at Vanhout.
The submitted projects were evaluated by a board of eight independent experts. The awards initiative, by La Chronique and Bouwkroniek, two weekly professional magazines dedicated to the construction sector, is part of the process of digital evolution of the world of construction.
Using data exchange, BIM optimizes the design, execution and management of a construction project. The BIM, short for Buiding Information Modeling, is the geometric representation in 3D of a construction. This digital model integrates all the objects making up the future construction, with data on their technical characteristics and how they inter-relate with one another.
