BIM @ BIG: The Journey from Small to Big, and the Learnings Along the Way

JENS MAJDAL KAARSHOLM: All right, thank you so much for tuning in to my little talk or class here today. So my name is Jens Kaarsholm, director of design technology at Bjarke Ingels Group. I'm going to touch upon the journey we've been on at BIG regarding BIM, especially given that we've gone from being a fairly small firm to a rather big firm, global firm, in a fairly short amount of time. We'll come back to that in a second. I always like to just kick off my presentations with this slide here, which, essentially, just shows this downtown style of some of our projects. I always find that a nice, little starter.

As I mentioned, my name is Jens Kaarsholm. I'm heading up all our design technology divisions at BIG in Copenhagen. And I'm also partly overseeing some of the more global initiatives as well. I've been with BIG for about five years, a little bit more than five years now, where I was initially starting as a pay manager. And I was given the mission, or task, to get our practice in Copenhagen back on track in regards to Revit and BIM, in general. That's also something we'll be coming back to.

And then prior to that, I was spending three years at Foster and Partners, in London, where I was also part of the initial team that implemented Revit and BIM in the office there. So I have, you could say, a fairly long history of helping that process.

Just quickly about the firm, in general, we like to say that we designed everything from light bulbs to city scale master plans and even country-scale master plans. We actually currently work on a plan for the planet, as well, which I would encourage all of you to check out on YouTube. Bjarke, our founder, has some very bold ideas on what we should do and how we could do certain things. So I would encourage everyone to check those out.

We are currently having six offices around the planet, one in New York, one in Copenhagen, London, Barcelona, and Los Angeles, and a small one in Shenzhen at the moment. We have five primary services, which is landscape architecture, architecture, in-house engineering, planning, and products, as well as we have this so-called, what we call a LEAP approach internally. And we try to do as many things in-house as possible.

Currently, we have 23 partners and about 750 employees globally. And we, for many years, have been having this, you could say, motto or a way of going about things that is really about yes is more, which is, essentially, a way for us to always try and keep on a positive mindset about challenges and obstacles and the ways of doing things. And we always try to remain positive in most situations, whether it's certain design-related things that doesn't work or in other cases as well. It's just like literally, everyone tries to put on their yes hat when we go to the office and remain positive, even when the people are saying that certain things cannot be done, or so forth.

Briefly about our projects, this is some of the projects, some of the more finished projects or completed projects recently. As you can see, there might be certain ones you know and have seen before. But I guess what I wanted to just show with this slide here is that, essentially, we have projects all over the planet by now. This is some of the work-in-progress ones.

This slide is actually somewhat old, so you could say that some of these should be on the previous one. But, essentially, again, we are trying to be present all over the planet. And we are pursuing projects wherever they wherever they pop up. So we are, by all means, a global practice by now.

But I guess today, what I wanted to really talk more into and provide some details about is how we're set up around BIM and especially, the journey we've been on. Because the company itself has been on a somewhat rapid journey, at least on sort of rapid expansion. And with that also follows certain challenges in regards to setup and how you structure things, and so on.

And given that I've only been here for five years, I've not been part of the entire journey. I used to be an intern more than 10 years ago. So I also know how the company was back then.

And when I left, we were 60 people. And when I came back, we were 600 people. And that was within 10 years. So it has been a pretty rapid expansion.

But more importantly, on this note as well, is that not only have we expanded rapidly, but we have also been one of the few bigger firms that have actually tried to switch away from Revit and into ArchiCAD and back again. And also, I just want to make a quick statement here today, that I'm going to mention a lot of software and different software. And the purpose of this presentation today is not at all to talk bad about ArchiCAD or better about Revit.

I'm not here on behalf of Autodesk to try and sell you Revit, versus something else. I'm also going to mention a lot of plugins and other tools, that they might work for us, but they might not work for you. So don't take this as I'm trying to sell you guys software. I'm literally just trying to show you how we've structured ourselves and how we operate. I think that's important to just quickly mention.

But I guess the first project I just want to jump into as the starting point is this master plan urban project we have in Copenhagen, which is called Superkilen, which, actually, funnily enough, is the first BIM project, even though it might not look like a BIM project. So we have this red square in the bottom, and then it runs through the neighborhood of Norrebro in Copenhagen.

And essentially, what's iconic about this project is that the whole project consists of a lot of different objects and furniture pieces that were requested or wished by the local community as part of the proposal. And one of the proposals was to build this square dance pavilion. It was a US lady or a lady from the US who happens to live in this neighborhood, and she requested to have this square dance pavilion from the her hometown in the US.

And the only images we had from the project was-- well, the only drawings we had-- sorry-- was a handful of images and a guy standing in front of one of the columns, that we knew it was 190. And back when I was an intern, I was given this as my first project to work on, to really try and replicate this square dance pavilion as best as possible, which, actually, back then, the only tool I knew was Revit. So this wasn't the natural choice for me to go with, even though the office wasn't really using it at the time.

And so you could say this is the first built BIM project at BIG. But on a more, let's say, serious basis, this is probably the first one we took on. This is the ski slope in Copenhagen. Some of you might know it.

But it's, essentially, a power plant with a ski slope on the roof, that we designed. We came up with the design back in 2010. And it has been ongoing for almost 10 years. And it's, essentially, this idea of-- we don't have any mountains in Denmark, but we have a lot of trash. And we also have a lot of people who likes to ski.

So why don't we combine having the ski slope on top of our power plant? Which we ended up winning as a competition in, as I said, 2010. And it took almost 10 years to complete. There was a lot of mixed use software in play.

And as you can see with the image here, it was a pretty technically challenging project to take on. And so by all means not, you could say, the most obvious choice as a starting point or a starting project for rolling out BIM, was given that the entire team was new to BIM at the time. I do think they actually did a pretty good job, given that this was the first big undertaking.

This is a snapshot of the facade model in Revit from back then. This is with the landscape done by our collaborator, SLA Architects, who did the landscaping. I think they did a brilliant job, given that the landscape package in Revit 12, 13, 14 wasn't maybe as good as it is nowadays, so kudos to them as well.

This is the final build project. So you can see it remained pretty true to concept. And nowadays, it's a publicly available place. You can walk up or hike up to the top and look out for free. But you have to pay to ski. But I would encourage anyone to go and check it out if you ever come by. It's also a great place to party. We've been having some pretty good Friday bars and Christmas parties out there.

Another one of the early BIM projects and also, one of the more iconic ones we've done is this LEGO house in Billund, in Denmark, where we, essentially, were told to design this LEGO house or this exhibition space for LEGO, or museum-style exhibition space. And it's also one of the few projects we have that actually made it into an official LEGO set, which is pretty cool. We did an even bigger model ourselves in New York afterwards.

What a fantastic project and very beautiful, and some would say maybe somewhat easy to pull off. When you look at it from the outside, it's very boxy and straightforward, at least, from a Revit point of view, to pull off. But if you take off the top of the project and look into the insides, it's highly technical and complex. So it's a very tricky project to pull off.

But yeah, as you can see on the inside, it's highly technical. It's, essentially, one big steel structure on the inside, almost like a bridge because the atrium in the middle has no columns. So everything drops down on four primary points to have this bridge style steel structure, but a fantastic project, very beautiful drawing set as well. It's actually some of the best-looking drawings I've ever seen in my career. I was not part of the team back then, but I will give that kudos to the team.

But what we found when we looked closely into this project was that the, let's say, on the inside of the BIM model, it was a little bit of a mess. Or at least, you could see that by the time, they were lacking standards. They were lacking guidance on how to do things. And the model itself were maybe not the most beautiful on the inside, at least. But drawings and everything else was absolutely spot on, and they're very nicely looking. And I'll come back to this project a little bit later.

In the meantime, our New York office happened, with this project as being the starting point. Some of the folks from the US might notice or know this project already. It's the VIA project in New York, which is, essentially, this "courtscraper," as we call it, like a morph between a courtyard and a skyscraper. Although we didn't really do much BIM on this one, it became the starting point for the BIG New York office.

And shortly afterwards, we won this Vancouver House, in Vancouver, that became one of the first initial BIM projects in New York. And Jan here has been with us ever since. He's now the director of BIM in New York and the guy who pulled off the BIM side on this one. And as he stated here, don't ask me how we did it. We just did it.

So this is a snapshot of the BIM model from back then. And here's the final building. So again, we stayed pretty true to our initial concept and how it was set up from the get go. There was a bit of Grasshopper and so on included in this project in the early stages. But a lot of it was also done somewhat manual because it was, again, way back in the days before Dynamo.

Later on, we took on this one, The Eleventh at the High Line of New York, so a little bit further south, another interesting one we've been working on. This is actually getting somewhat close to completion nowadays, so, again, one I would encourage you to check out at some point. It will have some beautiful views over New York City.

And for this one, we started to implement a lot more advanced workflows and scripting and Dynamo matching into it as well. So a lot of the stuff on this one were parametric and scripted to pull it off, but still in the early days or early days, but prior to any, let's say, Rhino.Inside, or similar tools that we have nowadays. And as we zoom into this render here, this is from construction. So you can see, again, we stayed pretty true to the initial idea and design.

A funny story to this one was, that as they started to erect the-- come up with the building, the New York Fire Department started getting a lot of calls from worried citizens who thought the building was going to fall over, which was a funny little side thing to it. But it was, obviously, the actual design. And I can assure everyone that it's rock solid and still standing out there.

Nowadays, we have a team of three people in the BIM team in New York. And we've always been trying to go with this rule of thumb that we need at least one BIMster, as we call them, per 75 BIGsters. So that's roughly our rule of thumb. That's what we typically stick to.

That's what works for us in regards to project support development, versus running projects and teams, and so on. And when we talk BIMsters, this is centralized people sitting in the central BIM team. We'll come back to what we have in regards to more project specific hires, and so on.

This is just one of the other, more significant projects we currently have, also wrapping up fairly soon, The Spiral, also based in New York. And another one is the Google headquarters out in California we also finished fairly recently, so some of the bigger US-based projects we've been doing.

Meanwhile, back in Copenhagen, what happened there was, that as New York was doing all these different projects, Copenhagen was struggling a little bit on the Revit side. And at some point, they were convinced or persuaded into trying out ArchiCAD. And I wasn't part of the conversation back then, so I'm not going to touch upon the reasonings why, and so on today.

But that happened. And they decided to go for ArchiCAD for a few years. And the project I'm going to show here is one of the early ArchiCAD projects. It's a project up in Norway, where we, essentially, were asked to design or expand this museum or sculpture park, called Kistefos. But instead of expanding the initial primary building, we decided to actually, why not make a bridge that would connect the park and also, become a sculpture and become a museum at the same time?

So we came up with this twisty bridge-style building, museum, whatever we call it. And I think this is a beautiful example that you can, basically, do fantastic architecture in any tool. So regardless of whether you're sitting in Revit, ArchiCAD, or for that matter, any other BIM design software, you can do amazing architecture in all of them. To me, or as I see it, it's more about having the right people behind the screen and in charge of the tools.

So we worked with ArchiCAD, and it worked for us for a few years. But there were, also, constantly these different issues that we had with it. And one of the main things we had was, that given that the New York team were highly, heavily running in Revit, we felt that it was too hard to maintain two different sets of templates and standards and other things. And also, we kept having people coming in with Revit skills, and so on.

So at some point, the office decided that they actually wanted to get back on having one singular piece of software, for everything related to BIM, at least. And so by the time, roughly-- yes, this one, we're getting finished-- here's just a few images from this site. I forgot those. This is the render site, the finished project, so yes, beautiful example of a well-executed project.

But by the time we were wrapping up this one, and so on, that offers decided to swap back, as I mentioned. And so around 2018, myself and this guy Soren, who should have a lot of credit on the stuff I'm showing today, because he's been with me the whole time and has been in charge of most of the stuff I'm showing today. So Soren should be getting a lot of credit for this, the things that I'm showing.

But, essentially, Soren and I were given the task to get us back on track. And so the mission was really get us back on track in Revit, close down all the activities in ArchiCAD, and get the practice up amongst the best at BIM. I guess the last one is open for discussion or judgment or how to say, I don't know when you ever know when you're among the best. But at least, we've gotten far on the other two.

And I've been asked quite a few times in the past-- and this is also, I guess, why I decided to do this talk. The talk was really about the early strategy. How did we go about swapping a rather big office around like that? And how do we do certain things?

And I guess the main message for me on this is really that we try to make the cleanest cut as possible. And it was, for us, all about getting it done as quickly as possible. So we also had to make some rather, you could say, bold decisions or decisions that would hurt certain people in the process. Which is why I decided to bring this project along with me, as this forms a little bit-- shows that point in time where we did the switch.

Because these guys who worked on this project, it's a project called Kampanilen in Aarhus, in Denmark, which is, essentially, this sort of clock tower. It's a residential project, but with a clock in the top. And the question here was really, should we stay in ArchiCAD and finish it? Because the team just delivered DD as Soren and I almost walked through the main door at BIG.

And the problem was that they had to wait for these neighboring buildings to catch up. Because they were sharing the same basement. So there was a fear from the project manager whether there would still be people in the office that knew ArchiCAD by the time this would restart.

And it might look somewhat small and somewhat straightforward, but it also did come with quite some complex things to it, especially the corner windows, where it both bends inwards and outwards at the same time. And also, we just had a very short turnaround time if we actually were to do this. And the entire team was new to Revit at the same time. So it was like, can we do this? Can we do it in time? and so forth?

We decided to do it, and we went ahead. And I had to go down to the team and tell them to completely bin everything they just did for the previous deadline and, essentially, remodel everything from the ground up in Revit, which was quite an undertaking and also-- they took it fairly positively, I've got to say, which was amazing.

So this is how it looks nowadays, as the scaffolding came down last year, beautiful project with a copper facade. And the neighboring buildings are also done by now, so everything is as it should be. This is taken from the site. Zooming out a little bit, you can see the master plan we also did. So the project on the-- [CLEARS THROAT]-- sorry-- on the right is also one of our projects. And we also did the theater in the lower part.

And this is taken from the initial master plan render we did many years ago. And I just wanted to show how close we kept our design to the initial master plan. It's almost 1 to 1, which I think is pretty astonishing.

You might notice this cigarette-shaped or snail-shaped building on the left, which is a hotel we're currently working on. So this is the current status in that one. It's still ongoing, but we are getting close to a 100% CD set on that one as well. So this will also come up in the next coming couple of years.

This is taken from the Revit model the other day, so you can see pretty complex as well. At least, there is, I think, 200 and something different window types on this one. So it's quite a beast.

Back on the strategy side of things, so actually, in all honesty, to be completely and fully transparent, we actually did not have a full-blown implementation strategy on how to do this. But we really wanted to just try and do the cleanest cut as possible. And we're also trying to keep things as absolutely simple as possible.

And then we also, throughout the entire time, and up until today, for that matter, we've really tried to maintain a positive mindset around about anything. So whether it was tough decisions on how to go about it, either remodeling or whatnot, or whether it was meetings with partners or with teams who were reluctant to switch, or whatever it was, we just constantly tried to maintain this very positive attitude to problems and challenges.

And then another thing we also quite early on acknowledged was that we needed more global alignment between our teams. So we started doing much more regular check-ins, much more rapid-- not rapid, sorry. We upped the whole communication side of things, so we just had more frequent meetings, and so on, on a global level.

We also realized that we needed to do a bigger ecosystem alignment globally. So this is, you could say, the ever expanding digital ecosystem for a practice like ours. So we're heavily Rhino-based in the early stages and heavily Revit based in the later stages. And then there's this all these different clusters of plug-ins and tools that taps into this whole design process.

And you might notice some of them. And there's also some here that we used for a while, and we've stopped using, and so forth. But, essentially, it's more to give you an impression or an idea of the amount of different tools that we need to manage and not only from a license point of view, but also from a training point of view and an onboarding point of view. So we really wanted to try and, you could say, yeah, streamline our process.

And especially around Revit, we also really highly streamlined everything. So we cut away a lot of plug-ins that people were using. We really tried to cut it to the bone of what is actually needed within our process, and how can we make sure that the people in New York and the people in Copenhagen and the people in London and Barcelona all uses the same suite and same amount of plugins? So I think that was a key decision we also made quite early on.

And then we started to adopt things like Trello and Airtable. And nowadays, we're actually more using Notion than Trello. But, essentially, we started to use a lot of these different tools on the market to not only track our progress from a development point of view, but also, for us to, on a global level, to align between what our teams in New York are working on and what are my teams in Copenhagen working on, et cetera. And this became a very-- or a great way of going about it, I think. And obviously, it's not rocket science, but it was just something that really worked very well for us in those early days of swapping things around.

We also, at some point, realized that we needed to revamp our strategy around BIM as well. So before my time or around the time when I was joining, we had this two-year strategy cycle, where we would formulate a BIM strategy and then present it to the partner group and have sign-off on that. And then we would stick to that for the next two years.

But at some point, Jan and myself, Jan in New York and myself, we came to the conclusion that the old format was just way too boring. As you can see, it was just boring pages, only with a front page image. And the rest was just plain text. And partners just didn't get on board with it.

So we decided to come up with a completely rebranded way of doing it. So we went with a lot more colorful approach. Also, we decided to only stick to five major topics per year. And instead of a two-year plan, we went for one-year plan. And then we tried to stick to five major topics every year and not more than five.

You could then have subtasks or sub-things within those five main elements. But we really tried to slim it down. And also, given that our CEO is a former McKinsey consultant, she is very fond of having milestone reporting and also, quarterly reporting on progress. So we also incorporated this timeline approach, where you could see by color, what sort of milestones do we have for each of the quarters of the year? And I think that worked really well.

And then I don't actually have any images in two examples here, but we also did include a lot more images and a lot more just-- we just generally made it a lot more sexy and appealing to see as a partner or a leader within the firm, rather than the old one. And I think that has really worked well for us in getting buy-in from partners and the leadership. So we always try to go with why, ultimate goals, how should we then go about it or pull it off, and then, who's going to pull it off? And we also always try to include images of the people who's going to do this so there's just some familiar faces on the slides as well.

Looking more specifically at BIM in Copenhagen, at the time, when we joined, Soren and I, you could say there was generally a lack of structure around BIM, given that they first worked in Revit, then switched to ArchiCAD, then never really got away from Revit. And also, I've got to say that they only had one BIM manager in charge. So he was having quite a tough job managing these two different platforms, and so on. So I'm not blaming him at all.

But you could sense that there was a general lack of structure around BIM and especially, around Revit. There were no proper drawing standards in place. They also didn't really have a real library of quality content. And templates were also a little bit all over the place, on the Revit side, at least; maybe not so much in ArchiCAD, but at least, on the Revit side.

So one of the first things we tried to do was to enforce the, yeah, you could say, drawing standards in the office, which is something that we used to have at Foster's, when I was there. And I mean, we, obviously, had not copied anything directly from Foster's, because our look and feel of drawings looks completely different from Foster's. But we adopted the same idea or the principle of having set-in-stone standards for how a drawing should look like.

So Soren had been spending a lot of time on tailoring these very specific drawing standards to BIG and to the Copenhagen office more, in general. And what we, essentially, did was that we actually took the LEGO house, that I showed earlier. We took the drawings from the LEGO house and used as the backbone for our drawing standards. Because as I mentioned earlier, they looked really, really nice and sharp and just look very much like a BIG drawing.

So we tailored everything based on those and defined everything from drawing arrows to hatch patterns to colors. And everything got laid out here. We also included small speech bubbles that would gives you advice or maybe a exclamation mark on, you might want to look out for this; or when you do a ceiling plan, you should remember to incorporate this and that.

And then it was all put together as an interactive PDF. So you can browse through a menu on the side and always see, like, OK, what should I include for a kitchen? Or what should a ceiling plan include, et cetera?

And then version two, that we're working on right now, is having a face thing included as well. So you can actually see per face what should be on a given drawing. So that's coming up.

And then what we did was, essentially, given that we sat down and defined all these drawing standards, that, then, made it very easy for us to completely tailor that into our Revit template. So the drawing standards, you could say, became the templates, or the templates became the drawing standards. But, essentially, if people are using our Revit templates when they start off a project, which they, in most cases, already do or always do, they will 1 to 1 adhere to the drawing standards from the get-go. Then, obviously, there can always be project-specific changes and requests from clients to either change title blocks, et cetera. But at least, we have a rock solid baseline to start out from.

Also, I mentioned, earlier on, this "keep it simple thing" that we really went with on the implementation side. And this really, also, can be-- how do you say-- seen within our templates because we really tried to slim them down, keep them as simple as possible. So we only included the bare minimum of standards and symbols and things that we would need for the drawing standards to be in place.

But we stripped it from-- so our templates do not come with a ton of different furniture or a whole bunch of different windows or doors, et cetera. We've removed all the, you could say, yeah, all the content side of things and placed that elsewhere. And I'll back to where we did that. But we went with a very lightweight approach to our template as a direct decision.

Another thing we also, quite early on, decided to do was to only do training in-house. And I know some would say this is somewhat of a controversial decision to do. Because I'm sure there's a lot of great trainers out there and a lot of companies that does great Revit training.

But my personal experience with external training is just that sometimes, trainers will teach everything that you can do in Revit. And there's certain things that we do not want people to do. For instance, yes, you can explore a CAD file. But is it wise to explode a CAD file? Or at least, should you show people that you can actually explode a CAD file, if you can start out by not showing them, and then only if they need it later on, explain them or show them, if that makes sense?

So we've gone with the philosophy of doing all the training in-house because then we know what we teach. We know what is being said, and we can push them in the direction we want and also, base the training on our templates and our standards and everything from the get go.

So three primary focus points for the beginning, as we started this transition-- and as I said, the overarching thing was really keep it simple. Don't overdo it. Don't try and make it too sophisticated or run all sorts of scripts in the background that needs to be executed, et cetera. We really try to keep it simple and straightforward for people to use and adopt, which, in a way, touches upon the next device or next thing I would quickly touch upon, which is the whole focus on the middle layer of people.

Because typically, what we've seen is that associates or project managers or senior staff, in general, sometimes becomes the bottleneck for implementation because they are so used to an old tool or a previous way of working, that they can be hard to convince at first. But we've also seen that some of the best BIM projects we've ever done is the ones where we have full support from this, you could say, middle layer between the partner group and the young and upcoming architects.

But we've made a strong focus on not putting them in chains. And I'm, also, personally of the thinking that you should always allow cowboy tricks, not to say that you have to jump the fence at the lowest point every single time when you can. But at least, running up to a big deadline, you should not make things harder, just because things have to be exactly as the BIM police says or how the industry experts in the BIM community says that it needs to be.

I'd rather that we actually deliver on time and that we get a nice drawing set out. And then we fix whatever issues we encountered afterwards, if needed. And then I think it's important to just manage their expectations and explain things in language. And I think the last one is really the key thing here, is plain language around BIM is a must, especially when you try to onboard people into this, you could say, domain and this way of working.

We use far too many acronyms and shortenings in the industry. And it's not making things easier when you have to train people and get them on board. So always use plain language.

Another thing we've experienced over the years is that project BIM leads are really key to a successful project. And we call them project BIM leads here at BIG. I know other companies call them BIM coordinators. Or there might be other BIM technicians. And there might be all sorts of titles for it.

But, essentially, what I mean by a BIM lead is someone who's full time on a project, but who is designated to run the BIM models and the BIM process and be in charge of that whole thing and, for that matter, also, the training of people on the team, on a daily basis at least. Because the BIM team cannot manage everything.

But when that is said, it's also important that you make sure that people put in charge of this task is also someone who actually wants to be leading BIM. So make sure you run interviews with these people and actually assess their skills and what they want with their career. I think that's really key. And if you find the right ones and the ones who really wants to do this, you will have a much easier time on your projects.

And again, back to this thing about having-- the best BIM projects are the ones where you have very hands-on BIM lead. And I think this next project here is a really good example of just that, which is this snail-shaped housing project, out in Nye, close to Aarhus in Denmark, a project that might actually look pretty simple from the get go. It's this residential building with these almost like pre-made-- it was made on site, but it almost looks like it was made in a factory, these boxy buildings.

But what was really tricky on this one was that it was, essentially-- we had to array these units around in this snail shape, which was not like a perfect circle, obviously. But it was also sitting on a sloped side, so by no means, an easy project to pull off. The team would also make a lot of changes. The whole team was new to Revit at the time.

And also, it was a difficult project to split up in different models because, again, we wanted to be able to run the script and array these groups and interior fit-outs around, but we also, wanted to split it up in sub-models as well, so not the easiest project to take on. But luckily, we had this guy Norbert on the project as BIM lead. And he was very hands on, very pragmatic, and very straightforward in his approach.

And he would also be the type of guy who would just put a guide together. Because he knew that he, from time to time, would have to go on holiday or be sick, and so on. So he made guides for everything, so anyone could take over in case he was not around, which, to me, was just a perfect example of how I see a great BIM leader or BIM coordinator would be. Just a quick render from the early part of the design, an image from the BIM model and then the finished project. So again, we stayed pretty much with our initial concept on this one as well.

The last project example I have with me today is our new headquarter, which I'm actually based-- you can't see it because of the background. But I'm sitting in this new headquarter here, which is a building we just finished in Nordhavn in Copenhagen, we moved into two weeks ago. And the reason why I'm bringing this one as an example is not because I wanted to show the building itself, but also, because we use this project a lot as, you could say, a lure or a project where we used real-time rendering as a lure to get people into the BIM models.

Because back then, we were using a lot of Enscape, that a lot of you probably know. And back then, it did not support Rhino at the time. It does now, but it didn't back then. So for us, it was a great carrot on the stick to try and get more people into the BIM model and into to actually working directly within our models. Because now they could also do studies and visualize things like structure and MEP more easily than they could in Rhino.

Only downside-- some would say it was not a downside. But at least, the only thing we, obviously, realized was that we needed to get stronger PCs for everyone to get a smooth experience. But that was a side thing. But, essentially, we were designing our own house.

And as you can imagine, it's hard enough to design your own house, in general. But when you have 23 partners on board, it gets even harder to get to conclusions, and so forth. So on this one, we made a deal. And especially with Alda, who used to be one of our BIM leads on the project back then, that we would always try and keep good-looking textures and everything within the building. So that whenever Bjarke would come home to Copenhagen and would want to have an update on the progress on the project, we could jump into Enscape immediately and walk around and see it in its full beauty.

And also, given that we did all the things in-house, so everything, all the engineering works and all the MEP, and so forth-- or a lot of the MEP. Not all of it, but a lot of the MEP were done in-house as well. So we had all the models in-house, so it was easy for us to make it look good at the time. But it became a really good lure for us and not only did it on this one, but this is just one example out of many, where we used real-time rendering in Enscape back then for getting more people into our BIM models.

So the whole concept of the building is, essentially, that we have these stacks of mega beams in concrete that span-- I think it's about 20 meters. And they're four meters tall. So a beam is almost-- or is one level in height. This is one of the early renders from Enscape back then.

And I think this here shows a pretty beautiful example of what we used it for. So, essentially, we used it to visualize the MEP. Because we have this mega shelf that runs through the entire building, and we wanted to visualize, where will we have to make some solid pieces in this shelf to hide the MEP? Which is what we can see here-- so just one out of many examples that we used Enscape for on this one back then.

It's located on this pier out in Nordhavn. So you can see we're going to have some-- or we have some pretty amazing views nowadays to the harbor and to the sea. This is taken about a year ago, I would say, but after they were done pouring all the concrete. And I will say they did one of the best concrete jobs I've seen in a long time. It's very sharp on the edges and just looks really good, in general.

Here's one of the views from the inside towards the canal of inner Copenhagen, with the opera house in the background. And here's another image from the inside, where we have this almost optical illusion, where you can see the main beam running towards the facade. But there's missing a column to keep it up. And also, the [? TT ?] decks are running towards the facade.

And again, you would think, what keeps it up? But actually, what you can't see in this picture here is that everything is hanging from the beam above. So in the next one, also, the same here. You can see, again, how they just run towards the facade. And you might think, how are these being held up?

But as you can see here, each of the [? TT ?] decks have a small, little bracket that holds them or makes them hang from the beam above. But it creates some very nice views from the inside. But yeah, this is from when they were done pouring the concrete. This is a few images from the inside.

Also, a funny story here is that we only have one column in the entire project, which is, essentially, this middle totem pole, as we call it, of natural stone. And the beginning, we sorted all these different natural stone blocks, depending on their color. Because each floor has a different stone.

But we ended up concluding, as soon as the engineers came on board, that maybe we should sort them by density and not by color, given that we, at some point, had marble in the lower floors and given that marble is, obviously, not the strongest stone. Then we ended up doing what the engineers told us.