The Luskin Center allowed us to unite our experience in the hospitality and higher-education sectors. We approached the project with a developer’s eye, focusing on comfort, cost and space efficiency, and with an institutional mindset, remaining sensitive to the building’s performance over time. Our central challenge was space. A height restriction limited the available space between each floor to house the mechanical systems. As CB Engineers Principal Paul O’Neill noted, “We realized, metaphorically, that we had to fit five pounds of stuff into a five pound bag. If we’d had a 10-pound bag, it would have been a lot less complex.” We used BIM and the building design software Revit to create a 3-D representation of the entire building. We modeled all of the equipment and showed how the building would operate in a virtual world. This allowed us to detect construction clashes early on and identify fundamental structural inefficiencies and streamline MEP layouts.