Portland International Airport’s $2.15 billion terminal in Portland, Ore., to be completed this summer is best known for its 18 million-pound wooden ceiling system. But keeping the airport expansion on track when most of the design team had to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a major planning coordination effort at Bluebeam Studio.
Before 2020, collaborative tasks at project designer ZGF Architects meant proximity. The walls of the company’s founding Portland office were lined with drawings, and teams discussed design conflicts in person, marking up physical sheets as well as in Bluebeam’s PDF software.
“We had entire walls covered in drawings,” recalls Michael Adams, ZGF’s associate director and the company’s BIM coordinator and manager. “I brought people into the room, talked about a problem and ticked it off together.”
But for the Portland airport, the largest design team ever assembled in Oregon history—engineers, architects, consultants, contractors, and owners—dispersed to different office locations when the pandemic sent them home in March 2020.
“Skanska, [the part of the Hoffman Skanska Joint Venture contractor responsible for BIM coordination] for this particular project, we received files, our contract deliverable at the end was our PDF documents, not the 3D model,” says Adams. “The model was there to help inform. [team members[, but our digital release agreement with the team at large, was that everything really lives in the documents and you could cross check it with the model if need be.”
To deal with remote work during the design phase, the entire project team switched from in-office meetings to Bluebeam Studio Sessions—an online collaboration site. ZGF moved its entire workflow to the shared digital environments where stakeholders could mark up the same drawing set simultaneously, regardless of their locations.
Switch to Digital Becomes Standard
Adams says there were more than 780 different design packages that needed to go out while everyone still worked remotely. This encompassed even the smallest deliverable, “even an early procurement package that had minimal Revit documentation [and was] a more high-level look at what to buy.” Everything had to be prepared in Bluebeam Studio Sessions to make sure it went right.
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ZGF had already used Studio Sessions, but remote work pushed the company to greatly expand what could be done with it. What was once a mostly used tool for communication was now the main platform for coordination meetings.
“The Studio site works a lot like SharePoint, where you go in and check out the file, check it in, and re-enter it with your changes,” says Adams. “So we used it as a pseudo-session environment, and when a big collaborative effort was needed, we’d collect the PDFs and push them into a session. Then it would act like a typical session with multiple people crawling around and making changes, and then we’d push it back to the Studio project side.”
Finally, review cycles that used to take weeks became a matter of days to complete. All disciplines and stakeholders were represented, and color-coded marking standards gave structural engineers in one time zone and architects in another a shared visual language without confusion about who marked what or whether a problem had been solved.
Assemblies linked thousands of documents into a single, navigable system, and Slip Sheeting kept revisions clean. Because there was a record of who changed what in the sessions, tracking made accountability visible to everyone, including the airport owner, the Port of Portland, Skanska and their subcontractors.
“All the metadata about who did what and when was there,” notes Adams. “The return on investment really showed after a few years. I kept beating the drum that I had to [use Studio Sessions]and the crystal ball came out right at the end.”
