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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2009
I hesitate to give this book a negative review because I think the subject matter is extremely important. Both BIM and Sustainable Design are the future of architecture and there is still enormous potential to create synergies between the two, using the power of BIM to create more sustainable solutions.
However, I was personally disappointed by the actual content of this book and ended up returning it. Amazon was nice enough to refund it no questions asked, so I feel like I owe them some explanation. For me, there was very little new, practical information on how to actually integrate BIM and Sustainable Design.
The first section discusses the history of Sustainable Design (going back to the pyramids of Egypt) and answers basic questions like what is sustainable design, why is it important, what is LEED, etc. If you have no experience whatsoever with sustainable design, you might find this interesting. If you have even a moderate level of knowledge of sustainable design (as most architects today do) there is no new information here.
The second section discusses what BIM is, how it works, and why it is important. Again, if you have never heard of BIM this might be news to you. If you have already been working in BIM for even a couple of months, you will probably skip over this section, too.
Then there's a section on Integrated Design. It's an important topic and a growing field of interest in sustainable design, but there's no practical, hands-on information on how to use BIM in Integrated Design.
What little practical information on using BIM there is doesn't begin until about page 127 and it is disappointing. The main BIM program disussed (and practically the only one) is Revit and pretty much all of the strategies for using Revit for sustainable design I had already learned in the "Mastering Revit Architecture 2010" book by Greg Demchak, Tatjana Dzambazova, and Eddy Krygiel. There are instructions for how to change your geographic north to make accurate sun studies. There is discussion of how to calculate surface areas, how to export to energy modeling programs using gbXML, and how to track and calculate recycled content material volumes. All of this is explained even better in the Mastering Revit book, which also contains much more information on using Revit and costs less.
I hope that future editions of this book will contain more practical, innovative content, targeted at people actually using both BIM and sustainable design, who are already familiar with both of them.
However, I was personally disappointed by the actual content of this book and ended up returning it. Amazon was nice enough to refund it no questions asked, so I feel like I owe them some explanation. For me, there was very little new, practical information on how to actually integrate BIM and Sustainable Design.
The first section discusses the history of Sustainable Design (going back to the pyramids of Egypt) and answers basic questions like what is sustainable design, why is it important, what is LEED, etc. If you have no experience whatsoever with sustainable design, you might find this interesting. If you have even a moderate level of knowledge of sustainable design (as most architects today do) there is no new information here.
The second section discusses what BIM is, how it works, and why it is important. Again, if you have never heard of BIM this might be news to you. If you have already been working in BIM for even a couple of months, you will probably skip over this section, too.
Then there's a section on Integrated Design. It's an important topic and a growing field of interest in sustainable design, but there's no practical, hands-on information on how to use BIM in Integrated Design.
What little practical information on using BIM there is doesn't begin until about page 127 and it is disappointing. The main BIM program disussed (and practically the only one) is Revit and pretty much all of the strategies for using Revit for sustainable design I had already learned in the "Mastering Revit Architecture 2010" book by Greg Demchak, Tatjana Dzambazova, and Eddy Krygiel. There are instructions for how to change your geographic north to make accurate sun studies. There is discussion of how to calculate surface areas, how to export to energy modeling programs using gbXML, and how to track and calculate recycled content material volumes. All of this is explained even better in the Mastering Revit book, which also contains much more information on using Revit and costs less.
I hope that future editions of this book will contain more practical, innovative content, targeted at people actually using both BIM and sustainable design, who are already familiar with both of them.
Product Details
4.3 out of 5
12 global ratings