When architectural design firm architecture365 was called on to complete the half-finished Pleiades condominium project in Austin, Texas, they inherited a structure with design flaws so bad that architect Kit Johnson says it shouldn’t have even been built. “There were some neat ideas—ideas that would be great fun to contemplate in an architecture class—but they made no sense in the real world.”

Among the major flaws were open vertical shafts that collected water (and thereby served as breeding grounds for mosquitoes) and exterior walkways that were positioned in a way to rob would-be tenants of in-home privacy. architecture365 opted to ditch the original plans and renovate the facility from its foundation and frame with its own design. The firm deployed GRAPHISOFT’s ArchiCAD 3D building informational modeling (BIM) software to make hundreds of changes from the original design and to integrate their own ideas. What’s more, ArchiCAD software allowed architecture365 to make the design modifications 75% faster than it would have taken with traditional CAD software, Johnson said.

Construction on the 25-unit luxury condominium complex now known as “Pease Place” is scheduled to be completed this fall.

(For information on GRAPHISOFT’s latest version of ArchiCAD, click here.)