An Interdisciplinary Capstone Experience Using BIM

This paper highlights the recent experiences garnered at the University of Cincinnati during a 3-quarter long capstone design course for structural engineering undergraduate students, working side-by-side with first year MS architecture students. The course was ideated to foster online collaboration among the students from the very start, using advanced videoconferencing and sharing software. The paper describes the challenges that were encountered and showcases the results obtained at the end of the course. Architecture and engineering students collaborated from the very initial phases on the "office building of the future", using Autodesk Revit as the common design platform. Engineering students then focused on the structural systems and attempted to analyze and design their structure using CSI ETABS, progressively updating the structural system into the Revit model. The results of the designs are summarized and commented, and some of the issues encountered are described in detail, both dealing with the interactions between architecture and engineering students, and with the interoperability capabilities of the software used. It is envisioned that in the next iteration of the course more engineering specialties will be involved, therefore broadening the scope of the projects, fully leveraging the potential of BIM.