MEP BIM Case Study - 7001 Arlington Road

• Coordinated BIM model in ~5 months
• Clash detection across all trades
• Bill-of-quantity docs delivered

7001 Arlington Road is a dense, four-story mixed-use building packed into a tight downtown Bethesda site, combining 140 residential units, ground-floor retail, and two levels of below-grade parking with a full mechanical, electrical, and plumbing system running through every floor. On a project with that much MEP density stacked on top of structural and architectural systems, Advenser Engineering Services chose Revit as the modeling platform because it let architectural, structural, and MEP teams build and coordinate their models together in one shared environment rather than working from disconnected 2D drawings.

Pairing Revit with Navisworks Manage gave the team a dedicated way to run clash detection across the combined model, flagging conflicts between ductwork, piping, and electrical runs before they became costly field problems. That combination of BIM authoring and coordination tools was well suited to a compact urban infill site where there was little room to resolve routing conflicts after construction began.

Fitting a full mechanical, electrical, and plumbing system into a four-story building with 140 residential units, ground-floor retail, and two levels of below-grade parking left very little spare space for ductwork, piping, and conduit to run without interfering with structural beams, columns, and architectural finishes. On a site this constrained, even small coordination errors between disciplines could mean expensive rework once construction was underway.

The project team also needed to keep architectural, structural, and MEP models in sync as design changes were made, so that a change made by one discipline didn't quietly create a clash with another discipline's systems that wouldn't be caught until installation.

Before adopting a coordinated BIM workflow, MEP coordination on a project like this would typically have relied on separate 2D drawing sets produced independently by the architectural, structural, and MEP disciplines, overlaid manually or checked during periodic coordination meetings. Conflicts between ductwork, piping, electrical conduit, and structural elements would often only surface once drawings were compared by eye or, worse, once trades were already installing systems on site.

That kind of manual, drawing-based coordination is time-consuming and error-prone on a dense urban infill building like 7001 Arlington Road, where mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems have to share limited space with structure and architecture across four stories and two levels of parking.

Advenser’s scope of services in the project consisted of modeling, clash detection and preparation of coordinated drawings for all architectural, structural, mechanical, plumbing and electrical components for all floors of the building. The design drawings for all trades were furnished as inputs in both cad and pdf format using which Advenser created a coordinated architectural & structural 3D model as the initial phase which was then used for MEP modeling which formed the second phase.

By resolving clashes between disciplines inside the coordinated model rather than discovering them on site, the project team avoided the rework, delays, and change orders that typically follow when conflicts between ductwork, piping, and structural elements are only caught during construction. The finished BIM model and bill-of-quantity documentation gave the project team a single, reliable reference for construction on a dense, 150,000-square-foot mixed-use building where MEP systems, structure, and architecture all had to share limited space.

7001 Arlington Road project was executed with a Turnaround time of over 5 months with the intensity of work performed depending necessarily on the stage of the project. A project-based pricing model was adopted based on the estimated hours involved for Advenser’s activities. Monthly invoices were raised proportional to the progress of work performed.