Watch the AT webinar, in partnership with Milient and Vectorworks, exploring how technology can be used to boost productivity, efficiency, and innovation within architectural practice.
What tools can architects use to help them run efficient, productive and innovative practices? How can technology aid the design and delivery of projects that comply with – or exceed – fast-changing regulations around environmental performance and biodiversity net gain? And how can practices of different sizes customise ‘off-the-shelf’ management software to meet their own specific needs? These questions and more were explored in this AT webinar, supported by Milient and Vectorworks.
Chaired by Architecture Today editor Isabel Allen, the event included presentations by Eric Gilbey, Product Marketing Manager for the Landscape industries at Vectorworks; Jack Stewart, co-founder of Remap; Matthew Nickerson, Commercial Director at Milient; and Herman Calleja, Sustainability Lead at SOM.
Speakers (from left to right) Jack Stewart, Eric Gilbey, Matthew Nickerson, and Herman Calleja.
Eric Gilbey kicked off by outlining the ways in which technology can help project teams to collaborate and coordinate the information and work required to comply with biodiversity net gain (BNG) requirements, and to ensure that the information is captured and reported in the most efficient way. This is particularly important given the wide range players with a stake in the process, including architects, planning officers, developers, contractors, and environmental investment agencies.
Data Visualisation tools within Vectorworks make it easier to envision and present pre-development and post-development habitats within project BNG documentation.
Gilbey stressed the importance of making use of classes and layers to decide what information to trade and share, as well as employing the nomenclature associated with the relevant UK habitat classification. A wide range of BIM tools, including the tree tool, hedgerow tool, and landscape area tool, can be used to document pre-development habitats for existing ecological values in a format that translates directly into the statutory biodiversity metric calculation tool used for planning submissions.
With Vectorworks’ 2025 release, smart objects, such as landscape areas and hardscapes, include BNG Framework settings among other sustainability metrics to make documentation and assessments easier.
Working from this baseline, Vectorworks makes it easy to assess the impact of introducing, or reintroducing, landscape features or habitats, and generate accurate visualisations of the site pre- and post-proposed development works. This allows reports to be produced quickly, efficiently and to a consistent format and standard. While the talk focussed specifically on BNG, Gilbey stressed that Vectorworks allows the same processes to be applied to a wide range of frameworks, including the urban greening factor and the biomass density index.
A Hackathon event held in June 2022 and run in collaboration with Wikihouse, HawkinsBrown, Here East, and Remap, explored ideas for extending and improving the Wikihouse system (photo: Damian Griffiths).
Jack Stewart, an architect turned software developer, explained how Remap, the company he co-founded with Ben Porter, helps practices adopt a ‘hackathon’ mentality, utilising the creativity and quick-thinking approach associated with design charettes and crits. Quoting Cedric Price’s provocation, “If technology is the answer, then what is the question?”, he advocated a first principles approach where practices focus on identifying ‘pain points’ that make life more difficult, and work together to develop a bespoke solution. Specific examples, developed with architectural practice HawkinsBrown, included a tool that automatically sets out ceiling tiles for any shape or size of ceiling; a means of automatically converting A3 presentations to powerpoint format; and an app to plan, record and track CPD activities across the practice, allowing staff to access all materials and document participation in accordance with new requirements set by the RIBA and the ARB.
The L&D Hub is an application for managing, capturing and tracking professional development at HawkinsBrown. It was developed off the back of a Hero for a Day Hackathon Event run by Remap, and themed around automation.
He also demonstrated how this approach has been applied to built projects, including: Don’t throw glass if you live in stone houses, a computationally designed stone pavilion intended to showcase the versatility of stone bricks and the endless possibilities of digital fabrication techniques; The Cambridge Couch, a project that melds public seating into a landscape, in a way that responds to pedestrian movement across the site; and All I do is fin, fin, fin’, a tool that adapts any façade design to achieve the desired environmental performance – to be used in design workshops alongside the project team’s decisions around factors such as response to context and aesthetics. The over-arching message was that architects shouldn’t be afraid to ‘get stuck in’, questioning existing technology and developing their own tools.
Milient project management software provides a real-time view of operations, enabling smarter, faster decision-making.
Matthew Nickerson introduced an all-in-one project management tool developed by Milient specifically for architects. Designed to unify and simplify data management, record keeping, resourcing, project management, and winning new work, the tool covers every aspect of practice life. Where typically a practice will have a range of systems in place – spreadsheets, calendars, accounting packages, email management systems – to manage projects, employees and tools, Milient’s project management tool combines them into an intuitive, easy-to-use system, designed to improve profitability, reduce administration time, and allow the practice to grow.
An effective resource management tool is essential when planning new projects.
This ensures that, for example, fee forecasting is linked to billing, and fee proposals are based on accurate information about resources and costs. It links project work to fee proposals, prompting invoices to be issued as soon as they are due, and helps with resourcing, by showing all workloads and diaries at a glance. This makes it easy to identify staff members who have an unrealistic workload or are under-used, and reallocates tasks accordingly. It also provides smooth data management, making it easy to access information needed for pitches and presentations.
The system ties project deliverables to key frameworks, including the Building Regulations, The Building Safety Act, and the RIBA 2030 Sustainability Challenge, making it easy to monitor compliance and ensure that all documents are in the right place at the right time.
Example of a Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) outdoor comfort study informed by wind studies with results imported from a separate CFD tool (image: SOM).
The final speaker, Herman Calleja, explained how SOM has developed a methodology to make a holistic assessment of the CO2 emissions, along with issues, such as daylighting, solar radiation, shading, and views of a given masterplan or spatial framework over its lifetime. This allows the team to compare the performance of different design options, allowing urban planners to make informed decisions at neighbourhood scale. It also identifies potential energy sharing opportunities between different assets, helping to reduce peak load and reduce energy demand.
This process considers public realm and pedestrian comfort, analysing issues, such as temperature, humidity and wind speed, to inform building shape and open space design. The methodology is constantly improved by ongoing research and collaboration, including, as an example, a collaborative project carried out with a student at the University of Westminster which looked at the impact of misters and vegetation on outdoor comfort.
Abstracting real-world data into different analytical layers to enable carbon emissions estimation at an urban scale (image: SOM).
User-friendly tools allow the design team to experiment with passive design options at the early stages of a project, and to understand the impact on embodied carbon, daylighting, and energy performance. Data and thermal simulations inform decisions on issues, such as glazing ratio and shading depth, generating a range of options that comply with targets for thermal comfort and solar gain. The design team can then select the options that are most appropriate for the architectural language being explored.
An in-house dashboard, Carbon Loop, allows the practice to track projects’ performance in terms of embodied and operational carbon, and to group them according to factors, such as program or climate zone. SOM has set a firm-wide target that, by 2033, all projects will see a 64 per cent drop in CO2 emissions compared to 2019 – an ambition that aligns with the Paris Agreement goals.
Source: Architecture Today