a house with walls relative to other walls

[Anonymous]

My first project to be a family house design.
Requirements
- the ground surface to be 240m2
- the house to be of "L" shape (in other words "two small houses joined at 90 degrees")
- one half-house to be smaller than the other

As dimensions of both half-houses are not defined (only total 240m2 is defined) I'll have to iterate the design several times. Imho an intuitive approach might be to set a central point and define lengths and distances of all walls relatively to the point. If not enough space for rooms in one half, I'd like to enlarge wall lenght (and shrink wall lenght of the other half) assuming all related walls would automaticaly update their length accordingly.

Questions
-is a such approach in Archicad feasible?
- is it a good practice?
- when drawing a wall, then selecting it, pressing "D" key to enter dimension and entering a number, the wall keeps old dimension, doesn't change. What might be wrong?

Can anyone help, please? Many thanks

[Erwin Edel]

Ahoj Pepe

You can offset walls by selecting more than one and clicking on the edge of the wall you want to offset, this will stretch the other walls along with it.

See below.

You can also connect any walls using the reshape > connect / extend commands.

You can also draw a marquee around items and use the reshape > stretch command, but that might end up stretching things you don't want stretched.

In early design stages you may want to use fills, zones or morphs for massing studies as it is quicker to manipulate those than a model with walls, slabs, roofs etc

[Laszlo Nagy]

You may also use the Zone Tool or the Fill Tool. Draw a Zone that is 240 m2 is area. Then use the "Offset Edge - Fixed Area" command of the Pet Palette. As the size of on side of the Zone increases the other side is decreased in size so as to keep the Area the same.