Greg Johnson

Our office has been using PowerDraw/CADD for about eight years now, primarily for architectural working drawings, though the program's intuitiveness for 2-D drawing has made it a great tool for presentation drawings as well, alone or in conjunction with other applications. For our presentation drawings to clients or for documentation purposes, we seldom aim at producing photo-realistic images. Instead, we prefer basic lines drawings, selecting the appropriate drawing projection which captures the essence of the spaces we are designing.

The images presented on these pages demonstrate several ways we use PowerCADD other than for working drawings:

• We use PhotoShop and a page layout program to combine PowerCADD drawings (often building plans, elevations or sections) with photo images. The digital camera has vastly simplified this approach!
• We have used the Architrion or Form-Z programs to create a 3-D model of a project. Depending on our requirements, we can then slice precise sections through the building, or after adding lighting and determining the best observation positions, "freeze" 2-D images. Importing these images into PowerCADD permits them to be cropped and cleaned up. As this is quite a time-consuming process, we typically only use it in situations where the geometry of the building is complex, and building sections, perspectives and lighting studies are difficult to create by any other means. Often the entire building does not need to be modelled in 3D, as the 3D tools in PowerCADD can be used quite effectively on the imported drawing to fill in the missing pieces.
• We have tried to re-think the way in which working drawings are used to transmit information from the design office to the construction site, exploiting more extensively the potential of CAD programs. Because of the simplicity and elegance of PowerCADD, we find we are making more use of alternate drawing projections such as axonometrics, which contractors often find easier to understand and are usually more efficient than traditional orthographic projections. With Alfred's recent addition of scaling into WildTools 3D, the whole operation of constructing properly-scaled axonometric projections has become as simple a isometric projections. (I would really encourage users to have a close look at the new 3D scaling option in WildTools -- its subtlety might be overlooked at first, but in my opinion it is a major advance in the tools.)

We are strongly committed to PowerCADD, and of course the Mac working environment, primarily because both are intuitive, elegant and simple to learn. This, in spite of continual pressure from the PC/AutoCAD world. These characteristics enable those actually doing the design to work directly in the CAD program. There is no efficiency in the two-step process of paper first, then pixels.

Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson has a background in engineering and architecture, having studied at the University of British Columbia and the University of Montreal. Following about a decade in Montreal studying and working, he returned to his home province, settling in Vancouver. At the present time he is a principal in the Vancouver-based firm of Marceau Evans Johnson Architects, a small firm who undertakes a variety of institutional, residential and commercial projects. The firm's work is typically located in British Columbia, but has ranged from dense urban projects to those in remote areas of the province, many for First Nation clients. Environmental sensitivity and technical performance are key elements in the firm's work.

Greg Johnson, Marceau Evans Johnson Architects, #205 - 440 Cambie Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 2N5, Canada. Office: (604) 683-0111, Fax: (604) 683-0131 Cell: (604) 897-5925 email: gwjohnson@telus.net

Drawings

Skidegate School    Walls     Axonometric Building