IntroductionFrom mid-August 2012 until the end of February 2013 I had the great opportunity to spend more than 6 months as a guest professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of National Taiwan University. The stay was made possible due to my research sabbatical from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar during winter semester 2012/2013 in Germany, and I followed an invitation of the BIM-center within a NSC funded research project of the university, headed by Professor Patrick Hsieh. Living in TaipeiMy family joined me for the time in Taipei which made the stay for all of us a wonderful and never exhausting experience in many aspects. To be precise, having 6 children at the age between 5 and 26, only the two younger attending kindergarten and high school stayed with us for the whole time. But the other four took also their chances in different ways to visit Taiwan and to learn about people′s life, culture and nature in Taiwan, and each visited us for some weeks.
Being asked for my most valuable experience from the past 7 months, I could name a long list of positive aspects. Outstanding have been the many open-minded, friendly, well-educated and supportive people, whom we met on campus and all over the country. Although I had read quite some literature about Taiwan before we arrived, and eventually had tried to learn a little bit of Mandarin, we practically had not much knowledge about living, about food, traffic, shopping etc. in Taipei, before we arrived. So we enjoyed the challenge of being exposed to very different cultural aspects compared to living and working in Germany. The colleagues, faculty and students at NTU helped a lot to get acquainted in Taipei by inviting me to different conferences and workshops within the university as well as at partner universities. And a happy faculty excursion to Sun-Moon-Lake, Chingjing Sheep farm and Zinan temple in Nantou gave me also the opportunity to exchange opinions about life and society and helped me to better understand Taiwanese life.
Taipei is a vivid city, where you can discover bustling metropolitan areas as the city hall district and, at the same time, very rural areas, for example the tea plantations in the Maokong mountains. Passing through the busy Neihu area in January we walked up to the BiShan temple for a gorgeous view from high above on Taipei city. And then we continued by a short 15 minutes walk, just to end up by picking strawberries on a farm in Dahu, which is situated in a far-off calm valley. And also the NTU campus offers many quiet places strolling around the gallery of NTU history and along Royal Palm Boulevard, where many families from all over the city enjoy their weekend days before they return to their homes on noisy Fuxing or Heping road. Working at the NTUA great and extraordinary experience was to live in a number 1 city and work for a number 1 university. My impression is, that besides the excellent worldwide ranking, NTU is number 1 in Taiwan in many fields, reaching from agriculture to zoology, including many fields as nanotechnologies, medicine, and, of course, civil engineering. An impressing recruiting event by the Taiwanese company HTC at the beginning of February covered almost half of the main campus. In comparison, in Germany there is a much broader pluralism, which also leads to a situation where it is difficult to point out the number 1 for any scientific discipline. My major task during 6 months as a researcher in residence I dedicated to the promotion of BIM. Building information modeling is a key factor for the innovation in construction engineering processes. Although people on smaller construction sites ask, whether this powerful tool might be too elaborate for the day-to-day work, it is already the most important method today, where complex projects shall be raised to a much higher level of proficiency. Nevertheless, by using building information modeling, building knowledge modeling and building process modeling on the basis of profound informatics and data management, it is still necessary to transfer construction processes into standard algorithms, to model buildings according to the construction sequence, and to optimize decisions in conformity to the technological constraints. We discussed the major challenges concerning BIM research on Building Information Modeling (BIM) in theoretical background as well as for the transfer into industry. Also we outlined the possible lines of cooperation by working on the development and application of a BIM cloud platform for collaboration in AEC projects.
In many discussions with students, with researchers, but also with partners from construction and consulting companies, I tried to help bridging the gap between informatics tools and the need of the construction management people. It has been very enjoyable to work together with so many bright people at the faculty and within the community of its alumni. Research achievementsOne of the backbones during these months was the intensive discussion with other researchers and graduate students about their personal research topics in BIM-related aspects. By co-teaching in the graduate course “Technology and Application of BIM” (CIE 5086), together with Professor Hsieh in the department of civil engineering, and closely attached to the BIM-center I was able to exchange views about the further development of construction related BIM-technologies. I could also help to guide young researchers along the different challenges from practice and from economy on the methods of Building Information Modeling and of Building Process Modeling within the BIM environment. The results from these mutual activities were displayed within a common oral and an exhibition presentation on January 2nd. Another highlight was the CONVR 2012, the 12th International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality, chaired in November 2012 by Professor Jessy Kang. I had hosted the preceding CONVR 2011 at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, so that we were able to exchange experience as well as to attract many speakers from Europe to this international conference at NTU.
I took several occasions to have intensive exchange with research colleagues also from other partner universities. I took the opportunity to give lectures at the National Central University, at the National Chiao Tung University, at the National Taipei University of Technology and at the National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences. Speaking about BIM-related research topics, it showed me, that there is a strong link between National Taiwan University and these other institutes. This also makes the Taiwanese BIM initiative very strong on the international scene. During my stay in Taipei we worked on a cooperation agreement between National Taiwan University and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in order to continue our good relationship and to establish further research and exchange links in the future. This agreement is now in the process of being signed by the department deans of both universities and will allow both partners to continue the good cooperation in research, education and student’s exchange that has also been one of the solid foundations of my research stay at the National Taiwan University. Research cooperation has been identified within different areas, all of them being designed for a better enhancement of BIM and the improvement of collaboration between different stakeholders along the design and realization of real estate and infrastructure. Another field of activity is the further standardization of BIM-models and BIM-related interfaces. Traveling in TaiwanAs a family we enjoyed a lot to travel around Taiwan. Being safe, wherever you go, is an asset, which is becoming scarce all over the world. But in Taiwan we always felt comfortable, secure and well received. This has been our daily experience in many cities like Taipei, Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Hualien and Yilan. And we enjoyed the backcountry as well, where even for Taiwanese people loneliness and quiet and undisturbed nature seem to be extraordinary features. One diaphoretic but very beautiful hike led us to Dali, a very remote small tribal village in the backcountry on the heights above the Taroko gorges, which we reached together with a small group of locals from the mountain. Another hike brought us up to lotus pond at the far end of the gorge. We hiked in the university’s gorgeous Xitou Forest Recreation Area in Nantou County and even started a hike from Sun Link Sea towards the Alishan mountain. Other trips took us on bicycles for example through the Old Caoling railway tunnel on the northeast coast and back to Fulong along the windy coast line. We enjoyed the countryside in Luodong along the Dongsha river from the National Center for Traditional Art and all the way down to the SuAo fish harbor. We rode along the Tamsui river and even up to the Taipei zoo along the quiet Jingmei river path.
We didn’t have time to see everything in the country. Nevertheless my biggest not yet experienced peak was to climb the Qixing mountain, when there is good visibility. While we were staying in wait in January and February of this year, we had several days of beautiful sunshine for hikes in the lower parts of the Yangminshan. But the top of this fabulous nature park remained in clouds and bad visibility. So I also have a strong “natural” argument to return to Taipei soon again. AcknowledgementI like to thank the NSC and the National Taiwan University for their generous support of my visit and research stay in Taiwan. It has given me plenty of opportunities to come into intensive contact with researchers from NTU and other universities and work with them. I thank everybody who was involved in the preparation of my guest stay, in the application for the research grant, and overall during the last 7 months. All of you helped me and my family for many times to get settled in Taipei and to get an excellent working and living environment. So I was able to learn a lot in engineering science and research as well as about the very warm and friendly Taiwanese people, their wonderful cultural heritage and many interesting and worth visiting places in nature and in big and small cities. I have taken home lots of valuable impressions and memories from research initiatives, from people and from culture and society. I do not consider that my contributions during the past more than half a year at the NTU will balance out all that my family and I have received from my colleagues and our friends in Taipei. NTU and Taiwan have definitely been added to the top of my short list of favorite destination – in all aspects. This makes me actively advertise for any research project, exchange program, visit or other chance for Germans to come to Taiwan and vice versa. And I hope to find some more opportunities to work again for this excellent university, to live in such an aspiring city and to enjoy a very pleasant country.
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