
I’m not, by the way on Graphisoft’s payroll, just a long-time user of ARCHICAD BIM as both a sustainability scientist with Arizona State University and as an architect in charge of manufacturing and design systems for the company I’m with.

ARCHICAD is certainly one of those Open-BIM systems that when used to its fullest extent, will enable architects to regain captaincy over the shaping of human habitats whose design & construction and performance, safety and durability are based on a great deal more than guesswork and hope.

This is important for us because our business model for making built environments is similar to those used extensively by aerospace and automotive companies, integrating design (in our case architecture & engineering) with manufacturing, fabrication and precision assembly.Īs John Kellet says, the folks at Graphisoft who wrote their BIM system starting in the early 1980s were architects in very much the same way that the folks at Applied Research of Cambridge, UK were and who wrote one of the earliest forms of BIM (OXSYS-BDS and later GDS) in the mid to late 1970s!īIM has been around for a while and from where I stand, there’s a substantial and exciting wave of innovation and change building up that will transform for the better the role architects play. The consequences of this can, as we all know, be fatal.įor us, ARCHICAD functions as a foundation block to our computational design, engineering and manufacturing ecosystem. This fractured model, based too frequently as it is on real estate speculation, is one in which architects in particular are severely marginalized into being little more than drafting services and whose real business, design and technological capabilities are rarely used. This means the company is thinking long and hard-with their users-about the future of the AEC industry, which will be quite different from the fragmented model employed today. These include but aren’t limited to Rhino, Grasshopper, Unreal Engine (Twinmotion), Solibri and a host of other specialized engineering, analytic tools and high-end graphic rendering & modeling tools.Īnd the other thing is Graphisoft are easy to work with and are staffed with very talented professionals who are actively engaged in the AEC field, which is reflected in their releases of each upgrade to the ARCHICAD BIM system.


We’ve been using ARCHICAD for years because it operates on both Windows and macOS seamlessly, is affordable, and pioneered the concept of “OPEN BIM” years ago enabling live connections to be established with other important applications.
