Creating architectural project with a BIM software: the 8i House case study

How to create an architectural project with a BIM software: here's the "House 8i" family villa project re-created using Edificius

In this article we'll be taking a look at how to create an architectural project with a BIM software. This week it's the turn of this interesting residential project modelled with Edificius.

We are talking about the 8i House, a particular family villa proposed by the Constantino Antolínez Collado architectural design firm and built in Cañadillas, Cuenca in Spain. This project overview allows us to observe, yet again, how architectural design with Edificius can be very simple and lead to surprising and unexpected results.

8i House, the project

"8i House" is characterized by 2 symmetrical distinct bodies, each of which constitutes an independent housing unit but with a single foundation structure.

The 2 blocks with alternating colours, in fact, develop separately on two levels: a ground floor and a first floor.
The ground floor finds accommodation for the living areas:
• a large living room
• a kitchen
• a bathroom
The entire daytime living area is fully illuminated by the glazed front facade, with direct access to the exterior open space.
A sunscreen effect is provided by the overhanging upper floor accessed from a U-shaped staircase located directly opposite the house's main entrance with a dark gray finish and illuminated by the long narrow windows.
The first floor leads us to the 3 large bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, one shared and one with direct access from the master bedroom where its striking cantilevered volume offers a truly breath taking view.

The basement also visually merges the two residential units acting as a walkable pathway to the first floor.
The garage areas provide two parking spots together with two useful rooms, 1 for storage and the other for centralising the building's technical systems.

8i House - design with Edificius

Modelling of this beautiful building with Edificius starts, as usual, with the modelling of the external surfaces, taking advantage of the program's landscape and terrain modelling management tools (contour lines, earthworks, etc.).
The following steps bring us to defining the building envelopes by means of the automatic recognition features from a simple 2D CAD drawing in both ".dwg" (or ".dxf") file formats. This feature allows the user to rapidly insert these other objects to:

• pillars
• beams
• perimeter walls
• partition walls
• floor slabs
• doors
• windows
• stairs
• furniture
• other elements

The various materials that constitute 8i House (reinforced concrete, wood, plaster, etc.) are already fully optimized and available in the Edificius catalogue ready for use.

8i House - interaction with Sketchup

Edificius' seamless interaction with Sketchup, once again, allows the user to create or customize all other accessories and details.
With the modelling process completed, we can now move on to generating beautiful photo-realistic renderings by simply positioning the camera view point in the desired position to set up our scenes.

No need to specify complex parameters; the default settings already allow the user to quickly obtain high quality professional results without too much fuss.
Now that we have all the project elements in place, we can finally proceed in creating a spectacular video presentation of the project using the internal real-time rendering engine that even acts as a design support tool for checking the various design choices during the modelling phase.

Click here to download Edificius, the architectural BIM design software