Imagine that – Sweco brings primary school vision of a sustainable city to life
Over the past year my colleague Claire Valentine and a team of sweco volunteers have been working on a Royal Society STEM project at Craigentinny Primary School in Edinburgh, which was designed to create a vision for a sustainable city. A number of our engineers from various disciplines visited the school several times and discussed sustainability with the school’s Primary 7 children, and offered their top tips on how to build a ‘sustainable and symbiotic city fit for the future’.
The challenge
Each team was allowed an area of 200×200 meters to distribute four towers, two “L” shaped buildings and then another building of the children’s preference. To give you an example, one team created a football field, another team a hospital, the third team a hotel and the rest of the teams contributed so the city included all necessary building utilities to be sustainable.
On following the project’s progress, I was so excited to see that there were so many interesting things that the pupils came up with. Then I thought…”How cool would it be for these children to see their city in a 3D environment and be able to walk around it!”
I instantly got in touch with Claire and asked her if I could participate in this project. The concept was well known to me: Receive mark-ups, discuss the concept, jump into 3D and create the photorealistic images. Take a look at how there world started to come alive thanks to BIM…
No cars allowed in this city, only bicycle and pedestrians. To achieve this, the city blocks were arranged in two rows and between them the children decided to have train tracks with the relevant train stations. Lots of trees and green roofs were added, with bridges connecting the towers were applicable.
At Sweco we transform society. By teaching our children the value of sustainability we make sure that the next generations will harness their capabilities and the technology to create the sustainable cities of the future. It was so rewarding to see the excitement of the children as they navigated around their own creation in a ‘real world’ visualisation.
Take a look at how we brought the childrens’ imagination to life using BIM visualisation below…
