The main lesson learned by the construction manager who recently completed a pioneering four-year, BIM-enabled project to build a replacement ballpark for the New York Yankees is “the more trades modeling, the merrier,” says James Barrett, manager of virtual design and construction for Turner Construction Co., the CM at-risk. But more doesn’t necessarily mean more complex, in terms of interoperabilty, anyway. Building on the experiences with the Yankees project, Barrett says Turner is satisfied for now to see subcontractors building their own models and working with their tools of choice, at their preferred levels of detail beyond a minimum standard, as long as they deliver models and revisions that can be coordinated in Autodesk’s Navisworks product line. “It’s the ‘lingua franca’ of our projects,” says Barrett.
“The more trades you can get to model, the better that coordination process is going to be,” says Barrett. On a long-running, high-profile construction job like a new ballpark for the Yankees, whose construction costs were $1.1 billion, coordination was king.