Digital Building of the Year 2017 is Telekom office building

The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications awarded at the 2017 construction projects competition the Digital Building of the Year Award to the Telekom Office in Mustamäe, Tallinn. The building was designed and constructed by AS Merko Ehitus Eesti, the architectural solution was created by PIN Arhitektid.

Jüri Rass, Deputy Secretary General for Construction at the ministry, declared the winner of the special prize and explained that the objective of the award was the state’s wish to recognise the best digitally modelled construction project and thus promote digital construction. Rass said that when evaluating the best digital construction projects, the jury mostly considered the efficient digital cooperation between architects, engineers, project managers, builders and the customer. “The Telia office building created by Merko Ehitus and PIN Arhitektid showed a clear vision of how to apply the principles of digital construction and the great end result,” Rass commented.

The building information model (BIM) created during the project became a real-time collaboration platform for information exchange and work supervision. According to Rass, the BIM, which makes the project a digital building, enabled efficient planning and management of meetings, determination of exact construction volumes and visualisation of construction views. “The end result provided actual benefits – the estimated reduction in workload was 40-60 per cent,” Rass said.

Alan Väli, Merko Ehitus Eesti BIM specialist, says that BIM takes customer-friendliness to a totally new level. “BIM offers the customer a much clearer idea of the planned building and its future usability, and allows us to better plan future administration costs,” Väli claims. “The builder is happy with the digital construction because it allows to make the collaboration between the parties smoother, to prevent mistakes and to save both time and other resources, thus taking the construction quality to a new level.”