Kieran Timberlake, PE International develop BIM tool for green building life cycle assessment

Kieran Timberlake and PE International have developed Tally, a new analysis tool to help BIM users keep better score of their projects’ complete environmental footprints. When used alongside other critical studies like daylighting simulation and energy modeling, BIM tools like Tally can help construction professionals move towards data-driven analysis for whole building life cycle assessment, writes TriplePundit.com.

Kieran Timberlake explains Tally:

Quantifying environmental impact typically involves performing a Life Cycle Assessment, which is a relatively new and confounding practice for most architects. Currently, no efficient means exists to evaluate environmental impact of materials during the design and planning process, when it can have the most influence on design decisions and building performance. An architect needs this impact data at the time of material specification, but the laborious process required for calculating embodied environmental impact across a broad range of design decisions prevents this from happening at crucial moments in the design process.

In principle, Building Information Modeling (BIM) ought to enable architects to acquire this information, but in practice, projects are not modeled to a sufficient level of detail to account for all of the materials in a building at their actual volume. In order to address these challenges, we invented Tally™, a Revit app that allows users to imbue each assembly with information about the architectural products it contains. Tally™ quantifies embodied energy along with other environmental impacts and emissions to land, air, and water. It can be used for whole-building analysis or for comparative analyses of various design options, and it can account for the diverse range of material classes defined in a BIM model, as well as materials that are not modeled explicitly.

For more on Tally, visit: http://kierantimberlake.com/pages/view/95/tally/parent:4.

Boyd R. Zoccola is Chair and Chief Elected Officer of BOMA International. A BOMA member since 1994, he has served on the Executive, Finance, Investment, and Medical/Healthcare Facilities Committees. An Indiana Real Estate Principal Broker and a board member of the Real Estate Round Table, he is Executive Vice President of Hokanson Companies, Inc., of Indianapolis, and has been involved in the development of $600 million worth of real estate. On a volunteer basis, Zoccola was president of Horizon House and a board member of Girls, Inc. He holds a BA in biology from Indiana University.