ArchiCAD Summer School: The ArchiCAD Office
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Report

Outline of Andreas Lettner's course in The ArchiCAD in the Small Office[Wednesday] - For the Intermediate AC User - Organising Practice standards, master layouts, templates and libraries, DWG/DXF interchange, for efficient use of ArchiCAD in the small office.
Andreas Lettner

The morning: 1000

1: Why this workshop?
Normally there is no defined CAD manager in the small office, although this is a matter of course in midrange and bigger companies. A designer (without advanced IT skills) finds themselves operating as CAD manager by default.
Designers in the small office are confronted with a number of severe undesirable difficulties like :

  • Loss of time and quality
  • No or problematical communication between planning partners and
    ArchiCAD operatives
  • Wrong or erroneous data exchange
  • Bad structured project files
  • Unnecessary double drawing and loss of data

Let's call this phenomenon cad + chaos

2: A brief history of the CAD CHAOS
I'll show some real bad examples just to analyze:

  • The folder mess
  • The file mess
  • The library mess
  • The layer mess
  • The attribute mess
  • Common problems of collaboration

Lunch 1300-1400

3: A strategy to fight CAD CHAOS

  • The rules of the house: Share the responsibility!
  • Systematic but simple order for projects
  • Strategies to collaborate between ArchiCAD + Autocad (and other flat
    cad systems )
  • The mostly forgotten collaboration between ArchiCAD + ArchiCAD
    templates :
  • Why shall we use our own templates and how to prepare them
  • Basic vs. highly predefined layer structures
  • The predefinition of pens, lines, hatches, categories, materials and translators
  • Master layouts : How to prepare master layouts
  • Maintainance tasks

1800

David NC writes: Andreas is coming from Austria specially for ACUE 2005. He is a working architect, and also provides ArchiCAD reselling and support in the Innsbruck (western Austria/Tirol regions). He and his colleagues have greatly advanced the market penetration of ArchiCAD in the Austrian market to over 50%- an important part of this is convincing the practices that they can make effective use of ArchiCAD as the total tool for design and production. Staff come and go in a small practice, and we know that incoming staff may not be so well trained or so sympathetic to the way of working with the virtual building and ArchiCAD - in a small office, an influential incomer may even force a backward step to flatcad. By offering this course regularly and frequently (and economically) in Austria, the ArchiCAD resellers have maintained the loyalty of existing AC users, and enlarged the working knowledge of the users. Andreas's english is perfect, and he is a forceful communicator and fully tuned in to European working standards.

Email: ArchiCAD University Secretariat for further information