How BIM helped to deliver the 104-storey One World Trade Center (WTC) tower in New York, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Shared on The B1M channel by Autodesk. For more BIM videos click here to subscribe now - http://ow.ly/GxW7y The new One World Trade Centre rises proudly, defiantly, from the reverent sadness of ground-zero. At 104 storeys tall it is New York’s – and indeed the western hemisphere’s – new tallest building. Standing at an exact height of 1,776 feet, it makes a direct reference to the date of American Independence. That, combined with its symbolic importance for the free world following the horror of 9/11, has led it to be affectionately dubbed the ‘Freedom Tower’. Costing $3.9bn to deliver, it also stands proudly as one of the earliest examples of BIM on a project of that scale. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) were the firm that oversaw design and construction of the new tower for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Their Partner Carl Galioto explained: “There were also numerous technical challenges; we had to integrate the building into the entire below-grade One World Trade Centre complex. That involved tremendous interdependency with other buildings and utilities. We needed the right digital tools for working on this project”. After a competitive software selection process, SOM chose Autodesk’s Revit Architecture software as the primary architectural design platform, enabling the team to work in a BIM environment. “We started off cautiously,” says Galioto. “Our initial plan was to use Revit complemented by AutoCAD just to model the subgrade levels. But on seeing the benefits down there, we quickly extended its use to the whole tower and moved into working in a BIM environment”. Mindful of the scheme’s prominence, importance and scale, Autodesk provided direct assistance to SOM…