On behalf of everyone at Graphisoft, I'd like to wish each and every reader a happy and prosperous 2004.

This is first edition of the New Year, and we're packing it full of features and articles. Our CEO, Dominic Gallello, draws a fascinating comparison and contrast between the manufacturing and construction industries. There's plenty of food for thought, so do make the effort to link to the whole article.

There are lots of valuable user tips, both tailor made for Envisions and from other sources, including CADdigest magazine. However, there is no Rendering of the Month competition in this issue. We have decided to raise the profile of this competition, we'll rename it and it will now run 6 times a year.

Design winner - November/December, Hani Nijem, Rainforth - Grau Architects, Sacramento, California, USA.

The image you see above is by Hani Nijem and won our November/December 2003 award. So, it is now more than ever worth sending in your high quality designs.

Read about Mark English Architects, a San Francisco design firm, which has improved productivity 25% using ArchiCAD. Quoting Mark English, founder: "We've achieved the significant goals of increased productivity and higher profitability using the software."

Also featured is Capita Property Consultancy's £333M/$600M project for a new National Health Service General Hospital for Derby in the UK. To quote Grant Steer, Capita's ArchiCAD Consultant: "...ArchiCAD's ability to change elements with ease during the design stage was a real benefit."

As always, your feedback is welcome. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any comments, queries or suggestions about any of the articles in this issue of Graphisoft Envisions. Contact details can be found at the end of this issue.

Andy Harvey

Editor

On the road with Dominic Gallello

Design for "Constructability"...

By Dominic Gallello,
CEO, Graphisoft.
dgallello@graphisoft.com

Expect the construction industry to adopt some of the techniques pioneered in the manufacturing industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

I constantly hear that the construction industry is a highly fragmented industry and waste is just a fact of life. You have heard the numbers before: 30% of construction is rework, 60% of labor effort is wasted , 10% loss due to wasted material. A large project generates 150,000 documents, and contractors need to pay 3-4% of a project for cost overrun insurance.

On my recent trip to Japan, I was reminded of the book, Comeback, the Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry . In the book, the authors describe the near meltdown in the US automobile industry in 1982 and what they learned about Japanese manufacturing efficiency. It was not technology that made the real difference in the meteoric rise of the Japanese; it was about process and human communication at the "right time".

There is no question that the art of architecture is different from mechanical design. Mass production of buildings is limited and most buildings are individual creations, not something that falls off the assembly line into a box. Still, the worldwide construction industry can learn some lessons from the manufacturing industry. I see a lot of similarities between an architect and a mechanical product designer, and a construction company and a manufacturing supplier.

It is the case that many in the building industry say that they can never achieve the efficiency of manufacturing, because manufacturing is much more vertically integrated under one roof. Nonsense! Manufacturers are almost as fragmented as the building industry. Just as the construction company complains that the architect is "crazy", because key elements of the building could never be built as drawn, the same is true in manufacturing. Mechanical designers and engineers, like architects, know a lot about design, but even today, they know very little about manufacturing a part. In mechanical product development, a part designed one way could cost $50K to manufacture; with just a slight change to the design suggested by the manufacturer, the same part could cost $30K.

So, what has the manufacturing industry done to overcome this lack of understanding of manufacturability by design engineers? There are two areas, which I shall look at in detail in the rest of this article. Please click here to read it.

Mark English Architects Boosts Productivity by 25%

Mark English Architects has realized a 25 percent increase in productivity as a result of using Graphisoft ArchiCAD. In addition to architectural design, the San Francisco-based firm has used ArchiCAD's Building Information Model as a selling point with potential clients and as a means of garnering support from architectural review boards.

"ArchiCAD has very much evolved into a business tool for our firm. It allows us to complete more projects with the same number of employees and, by using the building information model in our presentations to clients, we gain their confidence that the designs will succeed and meet their wants," said Mark English, founder of Mark English Architects. "We've achieved the significant goals of increased productivity and higher profitability using the software."

Read the whole story here.

Capita Property Consultancy, UK - Derby City Hospital

As part of the Skanska Innisfree consortium, Capita is the architect and health planner for the £333M (€470M/$600M*) Private Finance Initiative project to remodel and redevelop the existing Derby City General Hospital into a new acute hospital and specialist care diagnostics centre.

Partly re-using the existing building, and also incorporating a large new-build development, the design team has created a bold, but sensitive public building, providing a focal point for the National Health Service Trust, which is also reassuring to patients and provides a pleasant working environment for staff.

"ArchiCAD played an important role in helping us deliver the high level of design work required of such an important public building," says Grant Steer, Capita's ArchiCAD Consultant. "Furthermore, we were able to make both cost and time savings, thanks to the flexibility and ease of use ArchiCAD offers."

Capita Property Consultancy (CPC) is a UK-based, multi-disciplinary consultancy, which has built up a considerable reputation in the specific area of healthcare design. A division of the Capita Group PLC, CPC was formed in 1999, and has since grown into one of the UK's leading consultancies, with a fee income in excess of £100M (€140M/$180 M* - *January 2004 exchange rates). Read about the Derby project in full here.

TechTip of the Month

Our congratulations go to our latest winner, Lincoln Ellis, whose tip on Quick Renders received special recognition.

Lincoln's tip enables users to speed up rendering time over the life of a project and can be viewed here.

If you're an ArchiTalker, you already get great ArchiCAD tips and tricks every day - now Graphisoft would like to invite all ArchiCAD users to share their best tips in a monthly contest. Submit your best tips on ArchiCAD-Talk. The best tip will be published monthly and the winning author awarded a free Graphisoft T-shirt.

IRON Insights

Continuing our series of great user tips from IRON, our US network of resellers, David Pacifico has written a tip for creating Hotlinked Modules.

As you can see, the tip is beautifully & clearly illustrated. To check it out, see the whole tip here.

CADdigest ArchiCAD User Tips

Several useful tips have appeared in the online magazine, CADdigest:

• The ubiquitous JT Burk has provided a couple of tips:
  1. Offset Options in ArchiCAD.

Lots of screenshots are included to simplify the whole process. Read the whole tutorial in CADdigest .

and

2. Using Profiler to Create Custom Trim

Stone banding can be accomplished by using the Profiler add-on that is a standard feature in ArchiCAD. JT Burk's tutorial again makes the whole procedure simple. Read the whole tutorial here.

• Jon Sage has chipped in with his tip;

  Using the Magic Wand to Automatically Trace Elements.

The Magic Wand Tool is very versatile for automatically tracing elements with ArchiCAD. This tutorial looks at several different applications of the Magic Wand Tool and can be seen in CADdigest.

• The team of David Pacifico, Robert Bisset and Karl Ottenstein has contributed their tip:

  How to Take Advantage of Benefits of Solid Operations in ArchiCAD 8

This will give you some ideas on how to take advantage of the Solid Element Operations in ArchiCAD 8 and can be viewed here.

AECbytes Newsletter

Lachmi Khemlani's venture is now in its fourth edition. The inaugural ‘Viewpoints' article has been recently circulated and was written by Dominic Gallello, CEO, Graphisoft, and can be viewed here. The latest edition covers Macworld where Graphisoft was showcasing ArchiCAD 8.1.

To subscribe to AECbytes send an email to: subscribe@aecbytes.com or visit www.aecbytes.com.

Graphisoft Design Competition

Our old Rendering of the Month competition will be renamed. We wish to stimulate even more users to enter the competition, and we are going to make it more attractive for you to do so.

To encourage further entries to the competition, the prize for the winning designer is now a FujiFilm digital camera. The winning entry will feature more highly in this newsletter, in our online gallery, as usual, but will also take pride of place on the Graphisoft home page.

The image you see above is by Hani Nijem and won our November/ December 2003 award. So, it is now worth sending in your high quality designs more than ever. The competition rules remain unchanged and can be read here.

ArchiCAD 8.1 Availability & Update

The following versions of ArchiCAD 8.1 are now available from your local reseller:

• International English (metric)
• US English (Imperial)
• German
• Austrian
• Swiss-German
• Hungarian
• Japanese
• Czech
• Polish
• Portuguese
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Swedish

Contact your local reseller for further information.

ArchiCAD 8.1 will be available in 21 localized versions, plus the international English version, and released in 13 different languages. All the latest releases of Graphisoft products will be announced here in Envisions.

There is a patch available to address certain performance issues in ArchiCAD 8.1. The patch is available from the Graphisoft TechSupport pages here. It is strongly recommended that you read the release notes before attempting installation of the patch. Details here.

ArchiGuide - the Definitive ArchiCAD Database

ArchiGuide is ArchiCAD's general knowledge base where you can find detailed specifications on certain topics, as well as very short explanations for various issues. In this common database you will find information that is specific to certain ArchiCAD versions, as well as that which is valid in general. Browse by different categories or use the search engine to find topics related to what you are looking for.

ArchiGuide should be your first port of call when you have a need to delve deeper into the workings of a particular part of ArchiCAD.

Upcoming Events

• Denmark 5/4 - 5/6, 2004; 3D Festival 2004 , Bella Center, Copenhagen. Click here for further details.
• Germany 02/17 - 02/21, 2004; Build IT , Messegelände, Berlin. For further information, click here.

If you know of any significant events taking place in the world of architecture and you'd like to see them publicized, please send details, giving several months advance notice, to the editor.

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Thanks for reading this month's Graphisoft Envisions!