LT Architect - User Story

Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council user story - published in the AEC magazine

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Housing benefits - By Greg Corke

The property services department at Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council recently invested in LT Architect from CADlogic to help boost productivity on its refurbishment and new build projects.

Wirral is a chiefly residential peninsula, with seaside resorts, lying between the estuaries of the Dee and Mersey rivers, and, as a metropolitan borough formed in 1974, it has a population of a third of a million having a wide range of needs for building, refurbishing and extending housing estates, schools, libraries, and other council facilities and area offices.

These needs are catered for by the Property Services Department of the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, based at Wallasey. As with many organisations, Wirral Council started out with AutoCAD as its core CAD solution, and then, having utilised AutoCAD AEC and Architectural Desktop over the years, the organisation standardised on AutoCAD LT a few years back.

“We found that if you were carrying out large schemes then AutoCAD AEC or Architectural Desktop was a suitable tool for the job, but because the majority of our work is for alterations, LT was more than adequate, and of course extremely cost effective,” comments Brian Clark, Senior Architectural Assistant – Property Services, Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council. Of course, with work load pressures, Property Services is always striving to find ways of becoming more productive, and while AutoCAD LT provided a good platform to work upon, the department started to seek new ways to further improve efficiency.

“We started looking at the architectural software market to see if there were any tools available to help boost productivity. We looked for complementary solutions and one tool that came up was LT Architect (Release 1) from Cadlogic,” said Clark. “However, while there were a number of useful tools in Release 1, we felt that it was lacking a little in terms of functionality. We fed our comments back to Cadlogic and subsequently when Release 2 was launched, it seemed that many of these were taken on board and as a result of the new improvements we decided to make a purchase.”

After an initial investment, the department now runs ten seats of LT Architect, composed of six for architectural design, two for asset management, and two for the
building surveyors. (Asset Management, for instance, is a new Government requirement to show floor plans in a standard format of every building which a council owns, inclusive of condition surveys and utilisation levels, so that, for example, schools can be adapted to the right size for the number of pupils).

The productivity gains in the Council's architectural design and draughting through using AutoCAD LT with LT Architect have been beneficial. “Typical floor plans of a large building previously taking 3-4 days to draw up can now be completed in 1-2 days,” explains Clark. “We’ve also found features like the parametrics for drawing walls, doors, windows, stairs and roofs particularly effective. What’s more, when it comes to building sections, the extensive parametric library is extremely useful. Prior to LT Architect we used to construct these details line for line, which was extremely time consuming.”

Housing improvements

One example has been the management of a recent £2.7m project for refurbishing a 1960's housing estate, comprising both estate remodelling and home improvements to houses and flats in Greystoke Close and Molyneux Close, Upton, Wirral, in partnership with the UKwide building contractors Bramall Construction.

In this case, the local issues to be addressed have included: security, vandalism, domestic privacy, heat insulation, rewiring for electrical safety, as well as other problems associated with the predominantly elderly residents. To improve security and privacy, footpaths have been reduced and open spaces enclosed. Off-street parking has been created where possible.

Disabled access has been improved around flats. Meanwhile new UPVC, double-glazed windows and doors include security fittings to the current crime prevention recommendations.

Using its parametric engine to repeat and modify, LT Architect has provided a fast and efficient method of incorporating all these, primarily functional and expedient features, into the Wirral MBC's architectural designs within the required budget. LT Architect has then facilitated their rapid modification in response to the flow of comments and suggestions from tenants' representatives, surveyors, mechanical and electrical engineers, building contractors and suppliers.

Design communication

The effective communication of schemes has always been an important part of the design process for Wirral MBC, and recently the Property Services department looked into ways of doing this in 3D for some of its larger projects. In addition to a number of dedicated 3D solutions, VR Architect from Cadlogic was also investigated, and it impressed with its ease-of-use.

“2D drawings are all very good for architects and engineers, but when you want to clearly communicate a design to clients and tenants, you can’t really beat a 3D
image,” said Clark. “When we were first shown VR Architect it looked like a very simple way of being able to create 3D views with the minimum of effort.”

While Property Services was still considering an investment in VR Architect, Cadlogic released Version 3 of LT Architect in which the company bundled the VR module free of charge.

“Upgrading to Version 3 was something that we had been bearing in mind, as was investing in VR Architect to give us a means to create 3D images,” said Clark. “When Cadlogic decided to essentially give VR Architect away for free, it became a compelling argument to upgrade, killing two birds with one stone by giving us new improved tools and additional architectural symbols, as well as a 3D capability.

“As a result, once the budget has been approved and we introduce the VR into our workflow, we’ll be able to give clients a small VRML file on floppy to enable them to walk through the design in real-time, so they can immediately gain a much better perception of what the scheme will look like.”