Sydney Opera House (SOH) a prime terrorist target! Really?! Well, yes according to Chris Linning from the SOH who came in to give us a presentation on “BIM and Facilities Management at the Sydney Opera House” . Is there some confusion here between being iconic and being a target? 
Although the current threat is “Medium” which means an attack “could occur” (…how is this helpful?) according to the Australian National Security website, the facts are that the last time there was a terrorist attack in Australia was on 23 November 1986 when a car bomb exploded in a car park beneath the Turkish Consulate in South Yarra, Victoria, killing the bomber who failed to correctly set up the explosive device. That’s not to say there haven’t been people convicted of planning a terrorist attack but interestingly enough, not planning to attack the SOH but places like 2005 AFL Grand Final, 2006 Australian Grand Prix and the Crown Casino. Maybe, the terrorists can’t afford the hefty prices of $75 to $175/seat to get in and see the Opera house’s latest performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème”?
I think what might be frightening Chris Linning is that if someone did want to cause harm there are a lot of places to hide something bad . As he was talking about the labyrinthine systems of rooms, corridors and 56 Plants rooms, some of them hanging from within the shells or sails, I was thinking how this must be a nightmare to maintain, particularly in the early days when there were no “as built” documents describing the building’s structure. 
I had visions of maintenance engineers, lamp in hand and attached to pieces of strings fearfully entering into the tunnels of the SOH, some of them never to be seen again. But, it seems these mythological days are over. A huge task has been undertaken to model the SOH within BIM and this is the part of his presentation that I found fascinating.
Most of the presentations on BIM have been about it’s application during the development and construction phase. Here was a very different example of a BIM implementation. A building which had been constructed pre-BIM and which the BIM process has only recently been implemented. I feel that the focus of the uptake of BIM has been on new construction and we should be focussing more on how we can use this process on already built buildings. There are, after all, a lot of them! Cost is always an issue and it might be hard to justify a full implementation of BIM on a building already constructed but maybe we should be thinking about a “BIM lite”?
In a building the size and age of the SOH there must be a lots of things that could potentially breakdown. But this simply can’t be allowed to happen, there is too much is a stake. So how do they ensure there are no breakdowns? By having all the building’s “assets” in a database, a BIM database and carrying out preventative maintenance. Chris Linning showed us a visualisation of a plant room pump and how he could retrieve all sorts of documentation about it, like the specs and the maintenance programme. Linking in preventative maintenance with BIM allows you to visualise the asset, it’s maintenance regime and leverage so much more. BIM has even been integrated into their security system. Staff use “cyber” keys which control access to each of the, what I Imagine to be hundreds of rooms and not just controlling but monitoring who is accessing what. All very 1984….Big Brother.
All of these various systems, preventative maintenance, security, building monitoring etc all rely on BIM but they all have their own interfaces. The SOH currently has a project to create one single interface into all of these systems. They are only at the tender stage but this is really cutting edge stuff and I think if it were successful they might even be able to recoup some of their investment licensing their software to other large public and private bodies who look after buildings (just a thought Chris, if you’re reading….)
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Chris Linning took us through the use of BIM in the VAP project. This is a project to change the vehicular access to SOH from the front, harbour-side of the building to the back, park-side. It seems almost unimaginable to me that 50 000 heavy vehicles have to use the same access as pedestrians and then do a three point turn to finally get inside the building! I’d love to know how this came about. I can’t imagine it was “by design”. The new project has basically created a large hole underground which will function as a loading and goods access area. BIM has been used here to model all the services, roads that will be affected and the thing that is great about this project is that the five companies working on the project are collaborating on the same model, a model, I might add that was 96% clash free at the tender stage, and this model will then be returned to the SOH on completion. I love stories of seamless integration, when things just “work”.
So this is the end of my blogs on the various presentations we’ve had over the semester. I’ve written a last blog of pure concentrated goodness where I try to reflect and sum up some my thoughts. It’s mercifully short (for both you and me) and is the last in my Blog roll.
A musing digital discussion 