For example, he says, there were a few problems that were worked out much easier using BIM at the Chicago Medical Center project. “You have to design to accommodate for future technological advances,” Hamlin says. “Analysis tools have become much more sophisticated, and we had to try to figure out how to control floor vibration. With the sensitive equipment today, any floor movement creates distortion. We could have never done something like that using two-dimensional drawing, but now we can get in and examine thickness, mass and material strength that would have been much too complicated to examine before.”

Also, though the economic uncertainties of today have caused less building, it’s also had a side benefit of lowering material costs, Hamlin says. “We were working on the Great American Tower in Cincinnati, and I remember our crew was daily looking at structural steel prices, to lock in prices when it was felt was rock bottom.” He predicts construction activity will pick up through the rest of the year, but not drastically.