The French connection: Architrion, BOA, Archi-techPC, Triforma, ARC+

Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away there was the cultural rich Ecole of Beaux-Arts. Out of her influence came a number of architects (but not only) who were at the forefront of Architectural CAD development and academic research in the 1980's. I think they had an important contribution to the concepts that we take for granted today in software like modern ArchiCAD. You can write a book on the subject, but is my  honor to mention some of their achievements - early precursors of BIM software.

These programs introduced  the  "virtual building" concept for the first time, were you construct a 3D replica of the project and generate automatic sections, plans and  documentation from the model. However these software platforms were ahead of their time. Many had rather small market penetration and were not necessary a  commercial success, mainly due to their local market focus  (and expensive hardware required to run them).

Why are they important?
It's hard to explain in few words but has to do with the building data base in the software and the way the rectangular prism is used as a building block. (This was re-discovered later, when Sketch-up came about). These programs  work different from Autodesk Revit and is this  author opinion that their particular implementation of "virtual building" was more intuitive,  smarter and more "architectural" then the REVIT will ever be. In these early programs, the virtual building was all geometry, there were no "smart" properties attached to the actual geometry.  This earlier approach was and is sufficient for an architect to get the design done versus creating a full database of information attached to geometry (that is the case with REVIT). Feeding so much information into the model makes everything cumbersome and limit the designers to a status of "data entry" operators. Design does not work this way.


Architrion.

The grand daddy of  virtual building model - was developed in the '80. It's unclear what company developed first, but was owned at different times by GIMEOR INC, BAGH Technologies  and PAGE Technologie later. Some screen shots (collected from internet) are shown below:

Not surprising, was running first on Apple Macintosh PCs and had all the hallmarks of a modern bim system. Was marketed by IBM at one point and later SGI (Irix) and PC (Windows) versions were developed. It run at least from 1991 to late 2001.



BOA.
Some of the members of original team that worked for Architrion development went on to develop BOA, who is the next-generation of Architrion. You can still purchase BOA from here:

http://www.boa-research.fr/ 

Below are some images for BOA Software, (some courtesy of Architosh.com web site -who is the best site for architects on Mac).

BOA got some attention between 2001 and 2005 from former Architrion users but not much has been heard about and is not clear if is still actively developed. A demo version can be downloaded from the above site.


ArchiTech-PC.

Another wonderful program was (and still is) ArchiteTech-PC. It is developed by EDICAD in France at present time but can be described as a lightweight copy of Archicad. It works just fine for small to medium size projects like houses and light duty commercial projects. Researching for this article it seems that they released a new version "8.xx" who -you can tell - uses newer Windows apis. (Images below collected from Google Images)

Triforma.

Planning ahead

We will be looking at few of older (and less known) cad platforms that have came to past from Europe (for sentimental and historical significance), then we will be defining what kind of architectural firms are out there mainly in west as a market of cad software (and their sometimes difficult relationships with cad vendors) and then will publish a master list of cad software available now in what is becoming more and more a global market place. This list over time hopefully will became more useful as time past. Another task will be to define the criteria of how these tools will be rated. There is no such thing as "best software" that will fit all needs for all people but the intent is to figure out what tools are best at what tasks. The architecture has became more complex then ever and there are myriads of uses and niches to fill.

A little bit of background

This is a blog about Architects (sometime) and their beloved (or less so) CAD tools.

Turns out, even if is 2013 there are rather few independent (and useful) reviews for modern architecture CAD software floating around the internet. This makes it difficult to evaluate them on merit versus marketing "speak". Often, the software the architects and design professionals use is determined more by the market penetration of a mainstream product then real value. Main players  in CAD business (with large marketing departments) tend to steal the show and leave the smaller (and smarter) ones out of the media spotlight. This blog is looking to review (as much will be possible), the products available and provide an alternate and more balanced view at the tools used to create architectural drawings.
 
The profession has changed dramatically with the advent of CAD (and BIM)  in the last 10 years. However, few know that CAD technology has been around for at least 20-25 years, initially in domains that had nothing to do with architecture and more to do with building cars and planes, were the need to view, generate  and automate complex geometry was more acute then in architectural field. An excellent read at mainly British and American efforts to develop cad tools can be found here: http://www.cadhistory.net/ . The History of CAD by David Weisberg is a (free) primer on the subject. A shorter, chronological list of early CAD systems in western world is found here: http://mbinfo.mbdesign.net/CAD-History.htm.

Modern architectural programs (on PC or Mac)  usually are large and complex beasts and once you get locked into an ecosystem, is hard to snap out of it.There are many factors at play, from compatibility, corporate policies, price deals, support or local needs. Along the journey we will take a look in detail at much ballooned marketing acronyms  like "BIM" or "Cloud CAD",  that sometimes is pushed on architects responding to questions nobody asked for. Also we will look at stuff like 2D vs 3D, Unified Model vs Federated Model, solid engine options, file format wars, reference files, construction documents generation, rendering engines, solid vs surface modeling and so on. Welcome aboard and enjoy the ride!!