1700 Alberni

• Rhino geometry converted to BIM
• 387-unit twin-tower development
• Factory-assembled curtain wall

BEAM generates BIM elements directly in Rhino, allowing for seamless transfer to Revit. This integration streamlined the design and production processes, enhancing collaboration and efficiency throughout the project lifecycle. By facilitating this smooth transition between platforms, BEAM enables teams to focus on creativity and innovation while reducing the potential for errors and rework.

For 1700 Alberni's twin curved towers, this mattered directly: Heatherwick Studio's design relies on stacked, varying-radius elliptical balconies wrapping two high-rises connected by a five-storey podium, geometry that doesn't translate cleanly into standard Revit families. BEAM let the design team keep working in Rhino, where the organic balcony geometry could be modeled and iterated freely, while still producing BIM-ready elements for coordination with facade engineers and the broader project team as the design moved toward construction documentation.

1700 Alberni's design posed a significant geometric challenge: its two towers are wrapped in curved, varying-radius balconies that form a woven pattern across the facade, sitting above a five-storey terraced podium that connects the two towers. Modeling that many unique, organically curved elements without losing design intent required a workflow that could move fluidly between a freeform Rhino model and a coordinated BIM environment.

The project also called for close coordination between Heatherwick Studio's design team and the facade engineers and fabricators responsible for the building's unitized curtain wall system, in which the glazing, framing, and ceramic cladding are assembled off-site and shipped to the site as complete units, a process that depends on accurate, BIM-ready geometry rather than reference drawings alone.

Before adopting BEAM, teams working on freeform architectural geometry like 1700 Alberni's curved, varying-radius balconies typically had to choose between two imperfect workflows: model the organic forms natively in Rhino for design development, then manually rebuild each unique balcony and podium element in Revit for BIM coordination and documentation, or attempt to approximate the curved geometry directly within Revit's more rigid, parametric family system.

Manual rebuilding is especially costly on a project like 1700 Alberni, where hundreds of individually sized and positioned balconies wrap two towers of different heights above a stepped podium. Any change to the Rhino design would require redoing the Revit geometry by hand, slowing iteration and increasing the risk that the constructed building would drift from the architect's original design intent.

By using BEAM to move Heatherwick Studio's Rhino models into BIM-ready elements, the 1700 Alberni team was able to carry the towers' complex, curved balcony geometry from early design through to construction documentation without manually rebuilding it in Revit. That preserved design intent across two towers of 30 and 39 storeys, connected by a five-storey terraced podium, while giving the wider project team, including the building's facade engineers, BIM data to coordinate against.

That coordination was especially important given the building's unitized curtain wall system, where glazing, framing, and ceramic cladding are fully assembled off-site under factory-controlled conditions before being transported and erected as complete units. Feeding BEAM-converted BIM geometry into that process supports the tighter quality control and accelerated installation the factory-assembly approach depends on, across the development's 387 residences.