Urban Design (like BIG stuff) in Archicad

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Has anyone got any idea how you'd meet this kind of criteria for a town masterplan?

We need to design a city for around five thousand people. Now in Revit or AutoCAD architecture, you may try and do it with intelligent masses or spaces. In Modelur, you'd just do it but get stuck on the 2D print offs.

In practice, the computer model landscape will be littered with objects that sit in urban zones. These objects need to be able to return values for Gross Floor Area, Volume, Building Factor, Plot Ratio, Number of floors etc.

The zones that the building objects sit in need to return values for Total Gross Floor Area by Building Type, Average Height, Zone Total Area, Built Area on Zone etc etc.

I think you guys get my drift. Its buildings and zones - and they need to be able to return lots on numbers automatically.

Is this possible in ArchiCAD? The main killer in Revit is in creating floor levels for each mass at different heights and attaching these building objects to a zone in the city in a meaningful way. I've found postings here that seem to suggest there are similar problems in ArchiCAD.

Any suggestions or help would be hugely helpful!

Thanks in advance.

[Erika Epstein]

You can do this in the Onuma Planning System OPS

[Ingolf]

The last issue of the Nordic magazine ArchiMAG, has an article about The Viborg Project (ArchiMAG 1-2009 page 3,4) Viborg was a Finnish city overtaken by the Russians after WW2. A 3D modelling project using ArchiCAD is near completion (or is completed). The aim of this project is to model Viborg the way it was before the war, thus making a virtual city.
The Finnish ArchiCAD office can be asked about this:
http://www.mad.fi/mad/englishmad.html
Sorry I didn't find any direct addresses to the Viborg Project.

[Anonymous]

Ingolf wrote:
Viborg Project.

http://www.virtuaaliviipuri.tamk.fi/index.php?lang=en

Thanks for the link - that's a quite amazing story of the evacuation of that city. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole place turns up as a layer in Google Earth sometime soon - although ironically, I'm told that the place hasn't really changed since the 50's, much to the distaste of the Finns who can't understand why Russia took their second largest city and did very little with it in the years that followed.

I'll get MAD (Archicad resellers) in to have a look at this urban design problem and pitch the software, and I've sent an email to OPS, thanks for the link.

We're getting software in to test from CityZoom as well, which is dedicated urban design stuff still in Beta stage- but the problem there is that once we have it, we can't use if for architecture - like we could with Archicad.

Nice community here, taa muchly!

[Mats_Knutsson]

Helsinki_Dave wrote:

Ingolf wrote:
Viborg Project.

http://www.virtuaaliviipuri.tamk.fi/index.php?lang=en

Thanks for the link - that's a quite amazing story of the evacuation of that city. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole place turns up as a layer in Google Earth sometime soon - although ironically, I'm told that the place hasn't really changed since the 50's, much to the distaste of the Finns who can't understand why Russia took their second largest city and did very little with it in the years that followed.

I'll get MAD (Archicad resellers) in to have a look at this urban design problem and pitch the software, and I've sent an email to OPS, thanks for the link.

We're getting software in to test from CityZoom as well, which is dedicated urban design stuff still in Beta stage- but the problem there is that once we have it, we can't use if for architecture - like we could with Archicad.

Nice community here, taa muchly!

www.cej.fi does exactly what you are looking for and more. The have gone beoynd ArchiCADs already easy way of doing large city plans. They have tweaked the zone tool slightly.
Cheers.