Adele Bernard

Conference Chairperson
The beginning of BIM - 1984?...
“In 1984, a Hungarian physicist smuggled two Macs into his country. Ownership of personal computers was illegal under
Communist rule. Using Pascal, he and a teenager worked to write a 3D CAD program for the Mac.”

One year after the launch of the “electronic drawing-board”, the 2D CAD from AutoCAD (Autodesk), in December 1982 was born
and modelled buildings

ARCHICAD, from Graphisoft has been recognised as the first CAD product able to create both 2D and 3D geometry, as
well as the first commercial BIM product for personal computers and considered "revolutionary" for the ability to store
large amounts of information within the 3D model

Mr. Gabor Bojar, founder of Graphisoft, and his team built a 3D software for a project of network of pipes in a nuclear power
plant. The feat was not to build a 3D modeling software for plants, because they already existed. It was the fact that this was
done in a HP calculator with 64K of RAM. The GDL technology (Geometric Description Language) was designed for this
software,

Hungary, took this model and put it on a computer, so CAD/BIM ArchiCAD was born.

In the U.S. they took a drawing-board and put it on the computer, so, the 2D/CAD AutoCAD, from Autodesk, was born.
How to tackle the individual Sail moulds?
The biggest hurdle of the entire Sydney
Opera House project was working out how
the iconic sails – or “shells”

The weight and the cost of the materials for

the shells was a major barrier; formwork
would be hugely expensive, with individual
moulds for the sails would have to be made
in a unique shape. The issue was so
complex that the team went through 12
different iterations of the design.

The project was in some ways an early

forerunner of the technology used in
construction now, Building Information
Modelling (BIM).
Who remembers Singapore when in 2006...
World’s most expensive casino hotel!
Today’s Construction trends BIM
● Skyscrapers are growing taller
● Over 200m in height have grown fivefold over the past two decades.
● More rounded and complicated in design & materials
● Too hard to construct with traditional paper methods
● Unique designs are challenging
● Our agenda brings together a fusion of leading BIM technology organisations
and iconic case studies