In 2008 Ghafari was awarded an Architecture/Engineering (A/E) Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract with the US General Services  Administration’s Great Lakes Region. Under this IDIQ, Ghafari was selected to design the restoration of the Chicago Federal Center (CFC) Plaza. The Federal  Center was designed by Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s and is home to Alexander Calder’s steel sculpture, “The Flamingo”.

The restoration of the plaza included a replacement waterproofing system for improved energy efficiency, and the restoration of various plaza
components, such as the Calder sculpture, vehicle ramps, benches, landscaped planters, security bollards, handicapped curb ramps and  associated multi-discipline work at the sub-plaza levels.

In 2009, Ghafari was awarded a GSA IDIQ contract to provide BIM and, where applicable, laser scanning services for projects that are
to be BIM enabled. With Ghafari’s selection as both the A/E and BIM provider for the plaza restoration, the team had the opportunity to explore
new laser scan to model workflows and technologies for the plaza restoration’s design and construction.

Ghafari’s teams used in-house Leica scanners to collect more than 500 scans of the plaza. The data collected from these scans served as the basis for the generation of Revit models and drawings required under the contract.

Due to the project’s compressed schedule, Ghafari’s design team began creating the Revit model in parallel with the scanning effort, using existing 2D drawings of the plaza. The drawings from the 1960s provided a starting point that could be updated by the scan data. As scan  data came in from the field, it was registered using Leica Cyclone.  EdgeWise^TM by ClearEdge3D was then used to “automatically” extract  rectilinear polygons from the point clouds.

Importing automatically generated polygons into Revit allowed Ghafari’s Architecture and Engineering team to model only what was needed, when it was needed, to support the CFC Plaza Restoration and bypass a traditional intermediary scan-to-Revit modeling step. Click on the  SparView article link to the right to learn more on the improved workflows.

Ghafari is working with GSA Region 5 leadership and several of the CFC design/construction teams, under the BIM IDIQ,  to outline BIM standards to improve future CFC project efficiencies and downstream usability of CFC model data sets for move management and renovations.

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