Abstract:

Considering that the construction sector is globally responsible for 30% of energy consumption, 40% of CO2 emissions and 50% of raw material extraction, it is clear that there is an urgent need to implement actions to improve sustainability by controlling induced impacts.

Since, moreover, in recent years the digital world has greatly influenced technological innovation also in the construction sector, simulating the building process in the digital world allows the analysis of the performance of the building in relation to its components and its urban context, offering interesting insights both to conduct a series of reasoning on the impacts related to them on the city system and to understand, in terms of opportunities, how Building Information Modeling (BIM) facilitates the process of evaluation and control of urban transformation activities by reducing the critical technological and environmental issues.

The adoption of parametric BIM models allows the overcoming of inefficiencies that may derive from the traditional design method and provides preliminary support in the choices related to the building components and the materials that constitute them, through performance evaluations also in terms of sustainability of the choices themselves compared to those mainly traditional.

In particular, the parametric modeling through BIM platform offers among the many advantages, such as the temporal dimension related to the life cycle of the building, to associate to each element represented not only the geometric data but also other dimensions, customizable by the user. This advantage allows evaluations in order to data associated to each building component that, through the parametric representation, is digitized within the numerical model of the building. The greatest advantage lies in the possibility of evaluating choices both in relation to new and existing buildings, replicating in digital form the entire design process, construction and more generally the life of the building.

Starting from these premises, the paper illustrates the didactic experiences carried out by the authors as teachers of technology and drawing sectors in the field of some architectural university courses focusing its attention on the application of BIM technology as a project management tool in order to evaluate the choices made by replicating in digital form the design process, construction and more generally the life of the building.

The coordinated didactic approach highlights how through the use of digital tools that allow you to experiment with construction models 'enriched' by a system of a series of data, it is possible to provide strategic decision-making support also with respect to specific focuses in the context of sustainability.

Keywords:

Building Information Modeling, construction sector, didactic experiences, sustainability.