Large-scale engineering projects such as buildings and city infrastructure require millions in investments and tight coordination between expert teams across several years of design, construction, and operation. To tackle these challenges, the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is actively developing methods and tools based on Building Information Modeling (BIM). BIM promotes the use of 3D CAD models as a centralized database for all physical and functional characteristics of a facility and its related project/life-cycle information. The inherent complexity of a BIM model offers a critical visualization challenge: how to best display relevant information required by different engineering analyses? This work contributes to answering this question through both theoretical and practical approaches. The thesis first presents a systematic literature review on the current state of information visualization (VIS) in BIM research. The review analyzes in detail currently employed visualizations in diverse use cases across an engineering projects life cycle. Based on these findings, the thesis describes the design and evaluation of a novel 4D construction planning system that overcomes many limitations of previous work. Engineering collaborators used the software to review the real-world construction plans of an Oil and Gas industrial plant. The developed visualizations made evident schedule uncertainties, workspace conflicts and other constructability issues. The thesis contributes to BIM research with important visualization guidelines and also contributes to VIS research by raising awareness to interesting challenges in a increasingly relevant engineering domain.