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Case Study
15,500 m² mixed renovation in Brussels combining housing and a nursery facility. The project required a shared BIM framework capable of supporting collaboration across independent partner agencies and consultants.
Pole Rabelais is a 15,500 m² mixed renovation in Brussels combining housing and a nursery facility. The project brought together multiple partner agencies and consultants within a shared design process, requiring a BIM framework that could support collaboration across independent teams.
Collaborative architecture cannot rely on shared drawings alone. It requires a shared spatial logic, so that decisions taken by one office can remain legible and usable for the others without being reinterpreted at every exchange.
The main difficulty was not only technical coordination, but the absence of aligned BIM practices between offices. Multiple authors working in parallel risk fragmentation of models, duplication of decisions, and coordination issues surfacing too late in the process.
A unified BIM structure was developed to organize collaboration: templates, naming conventions, quality-control checkpoints, and exchange protocols defined a common working environment. In parallel, model validation routines and automated checks stabilized repetitive production tasks and kept deliverables consistent through each project phase.
The framework allowed design information to circulate more reliably between disciplines while reducing the coordination risks typical of multi-office projects. Milestone deliveries became clearer, issue resolution faster, and many conflicts were surfaced during design rather than during construction.
Pole Rabelais shows organizational architecture thinking. The real achievement was not only coordinating a project, but building the shared structure that made distributed authorship operational and reusable on later collaborations.