As an architect specializing in commercial use real estate – office buildings, retail, and mixed use – I am frequently asked by customers to employ glass to create inexpensive, modern facades that let light in and can be erected quickly and without the expense of traditional brick & mortar architecture. The work of a glass architect, however, is different from designing in brick and mortar because there are more factors that need to be considered to successfully engineer a curtain wall that can support both the dead load, it’s own weight, and seismic and wind loads that put stress on what is essentially a large sail as the facade of the building. While customary CAD certainly permits the design of so-called “glazed” buildings, it requires a lot of input on my end to ensure that my design is both structurally sound, thermally efficient, and of course good-looking.

 Because I am principally an architect and not an engineer, I find this aspect of traditional CAD to make it a little awkward to work with when putting together glass drawings. Beyond its non-specificity, conventional CAD environments also require to me create new objects for facades, rather than giving me a stock list of parts or object types, which takes up a tremendous amount of my time and requires me to create objects from stock spec lists or else research the feasibility of custom glass fixings, panels, etc.

A few years ago I was referred by a mall designer to Athena, a software suite put together by Glazier, a company that specializes in software for use by the serious glass architect. Because it is designed specifically for work in glass, it has made my work not only easier, but made it easier to be creative; and because it is loaded with stock objects for designing in glass, I can design faster, which has allowed me to bid on more projects. On top of all of this, the software includes tools for cost estimation, specifications for individual parts, and all of the other aspects of predictable CAD, except that it is tailored specifically for glass drawings.

While it is certainly probable to design glass facades in conventional CAD, at this point it seems like shear insanity to me. Having the right tools for any job includes having the right software for the type of design, and having a drawing environment and a whole host of tools that enhance and support it is something I recommend to anyone who could benefit from faster, more accurate, and more intuitive design.