Between the first sketch and the timber factory there are drawings, manuals, spreadsheets, and a lot of translating by hand. Modular timber construction already works like a precise kit of parts. The design process often does not. On Wednesday, 11 November 2026, we show with Graphisoft what happens when that translating step leaves the room.

Graphisoft’s event page lists the session as “Get a custom Archicad automation for prefabricated timber constructions”. It runs online, in English, as part of Graphisoft’s TechPartner programme, and the agenda has three movements. Gerald Faustenhammer, Product Solution Consultant at Graphisoft, opens with Archicad as a platform for custom workflows. Andrés Velasco Muro and Nora Bukovits of PAZ then take it from the modular timber system to the custom add-on. The third part runs from design to fabrication.

We are glad to share the screen with Gerald. A platform is only as open as the people who explain it, and his opener is the right frame for everything that follows: Archicad as a base you build on, rather than a fixed product you work around.

The rules belong in the model

The idea is simple to say and hard to ship. A modular timber system has rules: grid, element sizes, joints, what may sit next to what. Today those rules usually live outside the model, in a manual or a spreadsheet. Someone re-reads the design against them by hand, element by element. According to Graphisoft’s landing page, the session shows how PAZ-BOX brings modular building systems into Archicad with a custom add-on. Architects keep designing freely, the model already knows the system, and the path to fabrication runs without the re-keying.

There is a trade-off, and we name it plainly. An add-on that encodes a building system is only as current as the rules written into it. When the system changes, someone has to maintain the add-on. That is real work, and it belongs in the plan from day one.

The people this session is really about rarely get named. They are the project architects and drafters who sit between design and factory, carrying values from one document to the next and catching the mismatch before it becomes a wrong panel on a truck. Their care is what makes prefabrication work today. A good add-on does not replace that judgement. It gives them their hours back. That conviction runs through our teaching too: the 39 certified Building System Specialists who have come through our BSS Title learned to build their own tools for exactly these hand-offs.

←TODAY: Modular timber systems are already precise; the design-to-factory hand-off is still largely manual.
→3012: Building systems travel as rules inside the model, and the manual becomes a reading of the model.
Fulcrum: Precision in the factory only pays off when the design file speaks the same rules.

Atelier: An office drawing modular timber this autumn can usually point to the place where a person re-types the design into the system’s format. That is where an add-on earns its keep. Monday move: pick your last timber project and write down every document a value passed through between model and fabricator.

Hack: Count the timber kit your model actually carries before you decide what to automate. Archicad’s Python API (the archicad package with ACConnection) reads a live model in a few lines. As we wrote in our preview of the KI Back 2 Work Camp on 23 September 2026, counting what the model already holds is how offices find where the hours hide. This is generic API code, not the add-on itself.

from archicad import ACConnection
acc = ACConnection.connect().commands
for t in ["Wall", "Slab", "Column", "Beam"]:
    print(t, len(acc.GetElementsByType(t)))

If those numbers run into the hundreds, the translation step stops being a detail and becomes somebody’s whole week. For a look at how we package that kind of logic for Archicad offices, our Archicad add-ons page shows PAZ-BOX and PAZGPT.

How the session works

Questions are answered in a live Q&A for those who attend. Everyone who registers receives the recording and a Certificate of Attendance. The Q&A itself stays live only and is not in the replay, so bring your hardest timber question on the day.

Register through Graphisoft here: Graphisoft × PAZ webinar, 11 November 2026. Then find the one spreadsheet in your timber workflow you would most like to stop re-typing, and bring it with you.