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Growing firm grows up with ArchiCAD
Hurley Robertson and Associates - London, U.K.
In the less than 10 years since the founding of Hurley Robertson and Associates (HRA), the firm has grown from 10 to 50 staff and has marked London's cityscape with commercial developments ranging from a couple million pounds up to the L80 million office development at 120 Fleet Street. Runner Up in the annual UK Building Award of the 'Up and Coming Architectural Practice of the Year' in 1998, HRA succeeded in capturing the title the following year. HRA is also one of the largest ArchiCAD users in the UK with nearly 50 licenses.
"Our aim is to provide clients with an architectural service of the highest quality created by a dedicated team of professionals supported by efficient modern technology and systems," says John Robertson, director and co-founder of the practice. Right from the start, HRA chose ArchiCAD® as the CAD system to meet this requirement.
"Originally we chose ArchiCAD on a Mac platform as it was designed for architects and as such was intuitive to learn," explains John Hurley, co-founder and director. Ever since, the office has been successfully using ArchiCAD in a number of ways - for producing three dimensional drawings, for coordinating and updating plans, sections and elevations of a project for the benefit of all members of the building team and as a specially devised means of checking any potential clashes between the installation of services and the structure. With an inside look into three projects, Montevetro, 120 Fleet Street, and Acacia Road, HRA architects reveal how ArchiCAD has helped make the projects a success.
Montevetro
Italian for Glass Mountain, the Montevetro project is a luxury development on the banks of the Thames River in Battersea, central London. The L37 million private residential project, London's first major housing development of the millennium, consists of a 20-story residential development with 103 units, each with a river view. HRA worked as co-architects with Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP), on the Talyor Woodrow Properties development.
Co-architects RRP provided the initial planning sketches, HRA joining the project when there were still outstanding planning issues to be resolved. "In this early phase we tried to develop as much of the design as possible in 3D," explains Chris Eisner, HRA director of the project. Three staff were assigned to model the project in ArchiCAD one of a scale that hadn't previously been attempted at the firm. "The experience was very invigorating with everybody excited to actually see and experience what came off the design board. The contractor was especially pleased as it gave them greater insight into the building's unusual shape and its tricky junctions."
HRA's project team took advantage of ArchiCAD's versatile TeamWork functionality to organize their work. The five-person team easily divided up the project to follow the five connected blocks of the apartment building. Although a very large project, due to the significant productivity gains of working of automated functions, this small team was able produce all the necessary construction documentation using ArchiCAD.
"Being able to share the project and work in a real team was particularly useful," commented Festus Moffat, project leader, "since everybody working on the project received instant updates of their teammates contribution, the allocations of the workplaces could be easily defined and so a tight working discipline can be kept within the group."
120 Fleet Street
One of the firm's most challenging projects is the recently completed 120 Fleet Street, London EC4, project for a Japanese developer. The project comprises approximately 400,000 sq. ft. of office and dealing floor over twelve floors, retail units at ground floor level and redevelopment of the former Daily Express newspaper site. It required undertaking feasibility studies to analyze the massing and height of the building, together with various planning exercises to ascertain how the site can be developed either as a three-building or as a single-building scheme for a financial or professional user. Using ArchiCAD, it took only a few designers to develop the project to tender documentation level.
"Before we won the tender to design the new offices, only four people were involved in the project. John Robertson was the director of the project, two others were assigned the planning while the fourth person did the 3D modeling," explains Max Skjöldebrand, director. "Considering the size of the scheme it was a very small team!"
ArchiCAD's flexibility as a CAD system, one that allows easy and instant changes to the design gave HRA the opportunity to create different design schemes and make alterations while still keeping up with the tight deadlines. The whole building was modeled in ArchiCAD within a couple of weeks. Because of ArchiCAD's ability to allow easy creation of 3D library part objects (more than 200 different cladding panel objects were created just to model the perimeter of the building) no comprehensive programming knowledge was necessary for the task. The different cladding elements were assembled by ArchiCAD's user-friendly construction tools (slabs, walls and roofs) and saved into individual library part objects. After modeling the initial scheme of the design, making alterations meant only simple modification of library part elements - all the other relevant drawings of the project (floorplans, sections and elevations) were updated automatically.
"The biggest help was that none of us had to duplicate work already done by another team member. We got all the sections and elevations from the 3D model itself," says Mr Skjöldebrand. In addition to obtaining all the sections and elevations from the central model, ArchiCAD could just as easily generate exterior and interior perspectives much appreciated by the planners and clients.
Having obtained planning permission, HRA were appointed by the developers to provide all the necessary construction documentation for the building in a fast moving design and build contract. The team has quickly grown to over 15 people. The building was divided into separate sections: retained building, structures, cladding and interiors. Using ArchiCAD's TeamWork functionality gave designers an overview of the whole project, while providing well-defined segments for each teammate preventing overlap of work and unintentional interference on other teammates assignments.
"After we won the project, it was a different story. About twenty people were assigned to work on various parts of the building. What was amazing we still managed to keep the whole group together as a team, keeping everything above 1:50 scale in one file," adds Mr Skjöldebrand. One of the greatest advantages of sharing one central file among the team members was the approved coordination between the numerous drawing sheets. The team could rely on ArchiCAD to automatically update all referenced general arrangement layout when changes were made to a detailed core layout. For a job of this size, automatic updating for the revision of the hundreds of drawing sheets means serious productivity gains.
While ArchiCAD's TeamWork helped HRA's team work effectively together, HRA also had to establish a smooth communication flow with structural engineering partner Ove Arup and Partners (OAP). In a job where just the number of the steel columns used approached one thousand, laying down the groundworks of the file transfer setup between the engineers CAD software and ArchiCAD was essential. Using ArchiCAD's DWG/DXF import/export functionality digital communication became a simple everyday task.
Acacia Road
One of the projects HRA is currently working on is Acacia Road, a development of 12 high quality townhouses in St. John Wood, London, with a contract value of L8,000,000. The project is procured on a design build basis, where the "Design Intent" was given and HRA were to work with the Contractor to resolve this and produce construction information.
Using ArchiCAD's visualization capabilities, HRA was able to better visually coordinate structural and mechanical and electrical information. Creating a slideshow presentation facilitated collaboration on the project used in coordination workshops and helped spot errors. Though 3D visualization of details was undoubtedly important, project architect Festus Moffat notes, "The Hotlinking of repetitive elements was the most useful." A section could be drawn once and inserted into the model into multiple places. This greatly reduced the amount of time HRA spent redrawing when changes were instructed. "In 12 houses we had 24 bathroom types and 68 bathrooms. We produced 1:20 bathroom drawings and fed these into the Team Model making updating information automatic and allowing us to respond quickly to changes," adds Moffat.
ArchiCAD has been the sole CAD package at Hurley Robertson Associates for about eight years. As Graphisoft has developed the program, so has HRA developed their working methods. "Teamwork was particularly useful when we were working on Montevetro and 120 Fleet Street. More recently 6.5 has been a big step forward with other files being referenced as Hotlinks," Festus recaps. Having just recently upgraded to 7.0, HRA continues to provide clients with the highest quality in architectural services using progressive technology.
