BIMStom is the brainchild of Kimon Onuma, principal of Onuma Inc. in Pasadena, CA. "Yes, I conceived of and built the BIMStorm concept, but I also have a great team…a small team that can do a lot, very fast," he says.The exercise is designed to demonstrate how efficient development can be through the use of web-enabled tools, massive real time collaboration and open standards based information exchange. It uses online collaboration to engage architects, engineers, contractors, developers, building owners, urban planners, code officials, lawyers, insurers and other building industry professionals anywhere in the world in accelerated design and analysis.

Think of it as BIM Extreme, or a technology pushed to its limits.

"The BIMStorm demonstrates the high level of meaningful, large-scale design that can be created in a short period of time when professionals are organized using new process enabled by advanced technologies," Onuma says. BIMStorm LAX built on the success of earlier BIMStorms that focused on development in Boston and Rotterdam. "We were targeting 30 million sf, but kept on going. In the end, 50 million sf was submitted, but there was actually more like 150 million sf of variations of designs."

Onuma is an active proponent of BIM and has been active in the Open Geospatial Consortium's effort to better align BIM, computer-aided design (CAD) and geographic information systems (GIS). BIMStorm combines those components with the online Onuma Planning System (OPS), which simplifies the BIM toolset and integrates with Google Earth to display broader geography. The hosted service enables online collaboration and visualization among a broadly dispersed group, Onuma explains.

Onuma designed BIMStorms to demonstrate that building design professionals can significantly speed the design-build process via interoperable data exchange standards. Participants confirmed:

• Data from Excel spread sheets can easily be imported to design software to generate meaningful, 3D massing models.
• People without CAD experience can shape 3D massing models and land them on Google Earth to engage urban planners, government officials and the general public.
• Robust open-standards are for data exchange, allowing altered massing models that can be exported to a variety of design and analysis software.
• Data exchange provides ample information to check assumptions and feasibility with little or no lag time.
• Cost estimates can be accurate for developers to calculate business, environmental and societal return on investment.