JMC Accountants

AWE Engineering built a 3D Diamonds model for the new JMC Accountants office in Dronten, a 3-storey building by Lab32 Architects with a central void, a partial basement, and a facade-supporting ground-floor overhang. The practical GUI and the Level Manager and Design Types tools let AWE present a realistic 3D representation to the client and architect within days of getting design sign-off. When floor types, elevator shaft wall materials, and the basement had to be changed to meet budget cuts, Diamonds’ two-way data exchange with Tekla Structures kept those changes fast to implement.

The project

AWE Engineering office was assigned for the structural analysis of the new office building of JMC accountants located at Oude IJssel 3 in Dronten (the Netherlands).

This office building, designed by Lab32 Architects in Schimmert (the Netherlands) has 3 floors and is equipped with a central void of which the elevator shaft and surrounding stairway can be reached. A part of the building has a basement.

The ground floor is finished all around with a facade-supporting overhang and sits 1.1 meters above the crown of the road, giving the building a striking floating character. It’s precisely this kind of architectural creation that makes a project like this so interesting for us as engineers. The structure was set up by the architect based on a fair-faced concrete elevator shaft, sand-lime brick façades with insulation finished with a render layer, sand-lime interior walls, hollow-core floor slabs, and a roof structure of precast channel-plate elements.

Building the 3D model quickly with practical tools

After getting ‘green light’ of the architect on the structural design, a 3D model was created in the software Diamonds. This was very easily accomplished thanks to the practical GUI interface and the option ‘Level Manager’ and ‘Design types’. After only a few days, a realistic representation of the building in the 3D Diamonds environment was presented to the client and architect. We experience more and more that this is much appreciated. As additional advantage, we can better show our engineering task and goal to the client.

Adapting floor types, materials, and the basement without losing time

The strength of using Diamonds on this project was mainly experienced when the floor types and the material of the elevator shaft walls needed to be edited to achieve the desired budget cuts. Also modifying the cast-in place basement to a prefabricated basement was in no-time done. Next to that, Diamonds and Tekla offer the possibility to exchange model data in 2 directions, a feature which saves a lot of time.

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