“Canopée des Halles de Paris” Case study for an innovative digital approach to tender competition

The traditional tender competition procedure embeds a series of negative aspects, linked to the use of 2D technical drawings that describe geometries and technological solutions of which an architectural project is composed. The technical language linked to orthogonal projections is no longer a good medium to describe contemporary architectural concepts: during the tender a potential incoherence generated by 2D representation may lead to a not accurate evaluation of costs, risks, and time. The goal of this study is to introduce an innovative concept of digital tendering, integrating the traditional set of 2D technical drawings into a 3D interoperable model based on the widely diffused IFC format, detached from specific commercial approaches. This implemented documentation will help construction societies to better comprehend the complexity of the technical solutions, through a pedagogic 3D model which contains all the information needed for economical evaluation and a series of direct links to the whole project documentation. “Canopee des Halles” project was approached during the PRO phase, which preceded the tender competition. During this period the company DECODE played an intermediary role, developing a 3D master model based on technical information and made it evolve through a verification and correction process. Once the model was completed, DECODE acquired the documentation for the tender and started to fill the 3D model with semantic information useful during the calculation phase. Then the geometries were linked to their specific 2D technical documentation and the whole master model was exported into an IFC interoperable format. Construction companies received from the Paris City Hall a dvd, containing the 4D model (3D geometry + information), the pdf documentation attached to this and the eveBIM viewer. Into this innovative approach eveBIM represented the pedagogical instrument able to increase the comprehension of the project and provide a technical support to the calculation process through a paper-less approach.