Brisbane’s Queen’s Wharf project wins prestigious buildingSMART International Award for Best Design

Nemetschek brands ARCHICAD, Bluebeam, dRofus and Solibri mission-critical in delivering award-winning design

BUDAPEST, January 16, 2020 – In an outstanding display of IFC collaboration and Open BIM teamwork, PDC (a division of DBM Vircon) has won first prize in the Design category at the recent 2019 buildingSMART International Awards. The award recognized PDC’s Digital Engineering team for its pioneering and innovative efforts on the $3.6 billion Queen’s Wharf project in Brisbane, Australia.

Queen’s Wharf in Brisbane is a world-class integrated resort development that will transform the Central Business District (CBD) and the river’s edge. The Destination Brisbane Consortium is delivering the development, which will cover more than 26 hectares across land and water — equivalent to 10% of Brisbane’s CBD. The development encompasses 50 new bars, cafes and restaurants; 2,000 apartments across three residential towers; and more than 1,100 premium hotel rooms operating under four hotel brands, one with a casino.

“We made the decision to utilize BIM for two main reasons,” said Simon Crooks, Project Director, Destination Brisbane Consortium. “In the short term, for design coordination. This is an asset with over 340,000 square meters of built form — and that, from a coordination viewpoint, is critical. In the longer term, we’re talking about maintenance and facilities management of the asset, and we intend to operate for 99 years as per the terms of our lease. Again — BIM is critical to that process for us,” he concluded.

“Iconic projects like Queen’s Wharf are important learning experiences for us software vendors,” said Gergely Kmethy, Director, Customer Support Services at GRAPHISOFT. “The lead architect on this project, Cottee Parker, used ARCHICAD. We also worked with the PDC project team to explore best practices around IFC collaboration, involving software like dRofus for data management and Solibri for model checking. This experience proves that open BIM works on very large-scale projects as well,” Kmethy added. In addition, Bluebeam Revu is being used for faster, more accurate and thorough Quality Assurance (QA). On a massive and complex project like Queen’s Wharf that has quick turn-around times, Cottee Parker has created a more efficient QA process that minimizes risk, saves time and increases transparency, all using Bluebeam Revu.

The equivalent of 12 football fields of public space has been integrated into the design of the development as well. This public space will help to accommodate the additional 1.39 million visitors expected in Brisbane as a result of the project. Impressively, the development is also sustainable, having earned a 6-star Green Star Communities rating. In delivering the project, 16 different pieces of software were utilized by 39 contributing organizations. PDC (DBM Vircon) had over 340 models under management, with 215 individual models processed weekly.

“Queen’s Wharf is a flagship project for PDC, pulling together a team of highly skilled digital engineers to deliver a complex project with multiple interfaces, stages, programs, software, and teams,” said Alastair Brook, Director, Digital Engineering, DBM Vircon. “This allowed PDC to develop an integrated model that is already being tested in operations, some four years before delivery.”

To learn more about the Queen’s Wharf project, watch the video here.