Blueprints—Blue Cheese or Blue Murder or Blue Blood?

Mega scale projects of today, and tomorrow, have to hold many beams together—structural safety, carbon impact consciousness, timely completion, cost-control and disaster readiness. Are BIM solutions (and their adjacent tools) helping—and how? And are digital blueprints the next big hero for rescue-ops?

- Pratima H

What’s common between the Tower of Wanaka in New Zealand and the Tower of Suurhusen in Germany? It’s not that they are lopsided. It’s not even about that being deliberately so. It’s all related to the bragging-rights they claimed against a building that turned out tilted, and by mistake. We all know the story of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Thanks to a miscalculation about a soft subsoil, this building started leaning as soon as the construction began. From interruptions due to battles, to use of lead counterweights, to the design of upper floors, to the employment of cables, to the number of bells - a lot has been faced and tried - specially by engineers and designers - to correct the tilt and stop the tower from collapsing. Thankfully, this tilt has become its unique attraction, thus, inviting competition from some towers later (which, deliberately, tried to be lopsided).

Not every building turns out that lucky. Mistakes - at the design desk - cannot just result in deadlines, budgets and efforts tilting in the wrong direction; but they can also cause accidents, collapses and reputation-demolition. In the last two decades, technology has come to the rescue of designers, engineers and builders. From CAD to CAM to PLM and now to BIM (Building Information Modeling) and Digital Twins - there has been a lot of help and acuity available for the eyes, ears, hands and shoulders of people who 'build'. Mega projects continue to rise and try to balance their stability in the soft soils of sustainability, safety, disaster management, ROI and time-management. Which way is technology leaning now? Alok Sharma, Director, Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC), Autodesk India & SAARC shows us a not-so-rough sketch.

You have a strong PSU presence and play. What's different about them vs. other enterprises in the technology landscape? What's good and what's not so good (or different) about them?