Technology in Architectural Practice

The National CAD Standards organization has created a committee to investigate the applicability of the National CAD Standards to BIM. Click here to read the full post.
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Brian Skripac Assoc. AIA, LEED AP BD+C
Director of Digital Practice
Astorino
Pittsburgh PA
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Thanks for the posting, but the longevity of that original survey is dubious, due to the whims of the webstie administrators. It has already been deleted from other forums within the AIA.

Here is a link to the same survey at surveymonkey.com: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GWFTZLD
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Charles Graham AIA
Architect
O'Neal, Inc.
Greenville SC
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Brian and Charles,

I've been involved with the Nat'l BIM Standard committee for over a year now and during the V2 time frame, I suggested a ballot to include NCS as a reference standard in the event any BIM data would be translated to CAD. The members of the group thought that the NCS stood by itself and had little to do with building information modeling and NBIMS - which is all about the process of developing models and exchanging model-based information using open data standards. NBIMS does not make any assumptions about drawing production, even though that is the norm today. The group members also stipulated that if a soliciting organization wants a project completed using a hybrid of models and drawings, they can simply state, "building information modeling as per NBIMS-US and sheets/drawings as per National CAD Standard."

I think it would be extremely confusing for NCS to adopt any BIM standards at this point. The many choices for "BIM Standards" in the survey are mostly what I would consider 'guidelines.' I've studied most of them and could probably write my own dissertation on the topic! I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I think it would be best served to just think about how NCS would be applied to a BIM workflow. Our firm does just about all of our project work in a BIM (design authoring) platform (Revit) and in our internal standards, we utilize NCS layering for CAD exports and UDS for drawing arrangement. Beyond that, most of the other stuff is procedural guidelines/standards - which are mostly software-specific.

In the current NBIMS cycle (V3), I am involved with the Standard Practice Subcommittee, which will investigate how we handle the concepts of "best practices" and "standard practices." Believe me, it's a difficult topic because it gets really fuzzy when you get outside the realm of just dealing with the standard data schema (IFC). I welcome anyone on NCS to join in the work/discussions over at NBIMS so we don't duplicate our efforts. (We're all using the same web portal anyway!)

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James Vandezande AIA
HOK, Inc.
New York NY
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