• The Organizing Committee of the European BIM Summit has valued Kiviemi’s long academic and promotion and dissemination trajectory.
• Kiviniemi has created through the BIM an ecosystem of knowledge that, from Finland as the cradle of the application of this new methodology, has transformed the business system of the construction sector worldwide.

Intervention of the awardee in the 2019 EBS

The professor of digital architecture design Arto Kiviniemi has received today the European BIM Summit Award 2019 during the closing ceremony of the EBS19 held at the AXA Auditorium in Barcelona. This award is the only one in the world that recognizes those people who have stood out for their work in the dissemination and adoption of the BIM methodology in the building sector.

The Organizing Committee of the European BIM Summit has valued the long academic trajectory and promotion and dissemination carried out by Kiviemi to promote the design and implementation of initiatives based on the development of innovative, technological and collaborative projects in the construction industry.

Kiviniemi has created through the BIM an ecosystem of knowledge that, from Finland as the cradle of the application of this new methodology, has transformed the business system of the construction sector worldwide.

Arto Kiviniemi is an Honorary Research Fellow and former Professor of Digital Architecture Design and one of the world’s leading experts in Integrated Building Information Modeling (BIM) that he has developed both in Finland and internationally since 1996. During the period 1997-2002, Arto led the national Finnish R & D program that laid the foundations of Finland’s position as one of the first countries to adopt BIM.

In May 2010 he settled in the United Kingdom, first at the University of Salford, where he started the first BIM master program in the United Kingdom. In September 2013 he moved to the University of Liverpool where he recently retired in September 2018.

At an international level, the main activities of Arto have been related to the International Alliance for Interoperability, now known as buildingSMART International. Kiviniemi was one of its founding members in 1996 and acted as President of the International Council and Executive Committee in 1998-2000, Vice President in 2000-2002 and President of the International Committee of Technical Management during the years 2005-2007.