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Around 40 students from the Institute for Experimental Architecture.Hochbau of the University of Innsbruck enjoyed a particular treat in the summer semester of 2019: As part of the seminar Planning Process in Architecture driven by Element Information they immersed themselves in the BIM-based professional world of ATP. As a crowning highlight of the final event they were able to experience their digital building models up close and extremely realistically through ATP’s virtual reality glasses.

“The focus upon and the interest in the subject of digitalization and building information modeling at the Uni Innsbruck is growing hugely”, said assistant lecturer Philipp Zimmermann, noting an intensifying relationship between teaching and practice. The BIM experts of ATP Innsbruck spent the entire semester sharing with the students their practical experience of the highly developed digital planning method which has been employed by ATP since 2012. This expertise is also urgently needed because all public tenders in Austria are supposed to be using BIM by 2020.

BIM teaches – Brainfood from and for architectural practice
As pioneers, philosophers, and lateral thinkers we at ATP see ourselves as a learning organization and have been actively seeking to exchange ideas with universities for many years. This was already the second seminar on the subject of BIM in building at the University that has been accompanied by ATP Innsbruck.

“Our support of the prospective architects with our BIM know-how shows how close we are to the latest trends in this area”, says Klaus Hessenberger, the ATP Group Leader and architect, who sees the cooperation as a win-win situation. Projects of this sort not only strengthen ATP’s brand as an employer and attract future talented team members. Benefits are also inevitable at the level of technological progress. For example, during this semester Philipp Zimmermann used the BIM360 software to test the operation of a cloud-based solution on a tablet that is not yet being used in practice. This innovative approach enabled him for the first time to give the students tests and corrections in an automatic, synchronized form in a “protected space”, without having to print plans. This represents a very promising efficiency gain that, above all, could revolutionize claim management on the building site.

“The students and the institute are benefiting hugely from the professional technical and practice-related expertise. And this also represents an important paradigm change in design and teaching”, reports the supervisor Peter Massin, who initiated the cooperation together with Thomas Mathoy and has been teaching at the University of Innsbruck since 2013. The first discussions relating to a possible deepening of this cooperation and the introduction of further courses with ATP experts are already underway.