When Dr. Mikhael Johanes, a Design++ postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich, closed our KI Summer Camp on 4 July 2025, he made a quiet point. According to Johanes, most of the methods now changing the drawing board are decades-old research that has only recently become cheap enough to run inside a working office. On Wednesday, 21 October 2026, we test that point on the earliest and least tidy phase of an Archicad project: the Entwurf. Archicad Powersession – PAZ-BOX Entwurf runs at PAZ Central, Niederdorfstrasse 77, Zurich, 3 minutes on foot from the main station.

The design phase matters for a simple reason. Automation usually reaches Archicad offices late, at the documentation stage, when the model is stable enough to script against. The Entwurf works the other way. Zones move every hour, the competition programme shifts, and the same area check gets redone after every sketch. We think that repetition is where the machine should earn its place first.

The software has a long history behind it. According to our Archicad Freebies page, Archicad shipped in 1984 in Hungary as the first BIM software. Its founder, Gábor Bojár, trained as a physicist and wanted a tool that put the processor to elegant use. The same page records that the Grasshopper connection to Archicad turned 10 years old. Behind both are people readers rarely name: the Graphisoft engineers who maintain the Python and JSON API, and the GDL object authors whose libraries make every quick massing study look like architecture. This session stands on their work.

What we will do at the desk

We open PAZ-BOX, our set of Archicad Add-Ons that drives Archicad automation through AI chat, on a live design file. We use it on the tasks a project architect repeats while a scheme is still soft: placing and renaming zones, stamping rooms, checking areas against the programme, and producing variants without redrawing them. When we walked through all nine add-ons in a single morning earlier this year, readers stayed longest with the room-stamp and variant passages. This session goes deeper on exactly those passages, applied to design work rather than documentation.

Last Wednesday’s Powersession on Modellhygiene dealt with the file everyone else has to open. This one deals with the file before anyone else opens it.

The risk, stated plainly: a script that stamps forty rooms in two seconds will stamp the wrong programme in two seconds too, so the check against the brief has to stay with a person.

←TODAY: In 2026, most Swiss design teams still retype zone areas by hand after every sketch revision.
→3012: In Zurich-3012, the Entwurf is a conversation with the model, and the architect’s job is judgement, not arithmetic.
Fulcrum: Automating the soft phase only works if the office still knows which numbers it is meant to doubt.

Atelier: For a small Zurich studio in competition season, the hours go into repetition, not design. That makes the Entwurf the safest place for a team to start trusting an AI assistant: the stakes are low, the loops are fast, and every mistake is visible on the plan. Monday move: pick one live competition file, time one full zone-and-area pass by hand, and bring that number to the session.

Hack: Count the zones in your Entwurf without opening a single schedule. Graphisoft’s official archicad Python package talks to the running Archicad file over its JSON API. These lines list every zone, so you can compare the count against the programme before anyone exports anything.

from archicad import ACConnection
conn = ACConnection.connect()
acc = conn.commands
zones = acc.GetElementsByType('Zone')
print(len(zones), 'zones in this Entwurf')

Run it once after every sketch revision. If the count drifts from the brief, you have found the error before the area sheet did.

Who should come: Archicad power users, project architects who carry a scheme through competition, BIM coordinators who inherit design files later, and students who want the habit early. The same habits run through our Building System Specialist Title, a programme of 5 months at 6 hours a week that, according to our BSS record, has certified 39 specialists so far. Seats and details are on our Powersession – PAZ-BOX Entwurf page.

Bring one real Entwurf file and the single task you repeat most inside it. We will build from that.