BUILDING
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel
Ghafari Associates, L.L.C.
The Renaissance Boston Waterfront, a new 22
story hotel owned by Marriott International, will
be completed in the fall of 2006. It will feature
471 guest rooms, including 21 suites, and contain
over 20,700 square feet of meeting space including a 10,700-square-foot ballroom, a junior ballroom, a restaurant and restaurant lounge, room
service, and banquet facilities. The hotel will also
provide a fitness center with a lap-pool and treatment
rooms, an outdoor terrace, and a business center.
GHAFARI Associates acted as the 3D integrator
and wanted to apply successes from its automotive design and construction building information
modeling (BIM) experience to a new market segment, the hospitality industry. Using Bentley products, the project team quickly and flexibly organized and delivered early 3D models for the entire
building and continued to reuse those models in
a variety of ways to effectively track progress and
design changes throughout the construction phases.
Bentley Structural allowed the team to use industry standard file formats and integrate the steel
fabricator’s 3D model files, when they became
available, into the overall BIM. This reduced the
chances for data re-entry mistakes and saved hundreds of hours of rework that would have been
required if the models were to be updated using
conventional 2D document methods. In addition,
Bentley’s support for the DWG format allowed the
team to interface with the 3D models supplied
by the sheet-metal fabricator as well as other file
types provided by the subcontractors and the
design team.
In the course of the project, GHAFARI Associates
used TriForma, Bentley Architecture, Bentley
Structural, Bentley Building Mechanical,
Plantspace design series, Bentley Interference
Manager, ProjectWise Application Server,
Project Wise Web Server, and Bentley Publisher. ;
