Every Swiss plan set follows a document written before it. SIA 400, Planbearbeitung im Hochbau, is the norm from the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects (SIA) that sets how building plans in this country are drawn, labelled and read. It covers line types, scales, hatching, dimensioning and how a sheet is titled. Most offices work to it every day without ever opening it. Our next PAZ Archicad Power Session is about that norm. We will take SIA 400 out of people’s habits and put it into the Archicad template, so the template applies it every time.

We want to credit the SIA commission members first. SIA norms are written in Switzerland’s militia tradition by commissions of practising architects and engineers, and their names rarely reach the drawings that depend on their work. Because of that work, a Bauleitung team in Chur can read a plan from an office in Geneva without a phone call. We think it is one of the quietest and most useful pieces of infrastructure in Swiss building, and teaching it well is one way of thanking them.

Why Archicad, and why now

Gábor Bojár’s Graphisoft shipped Archicad in Budapest in 1984, which makes it the oldest BIM tool still in daily use. That long history is part of why a norm like SIA 400 can live inside a single file. Pen sets, line types, fills, Model View Options and layout masters can all be set to meet the norm, and every new project then inherits them. Offices that skip this step end up correcting drawing by drawing. Someone checks pen weights by eye before every submission, and the same fixes come back on the next project because nobody changed the template.

We have worked on this before. According to our Power Session page, this session goes deep on one norm. Our Archicad Bootcamp page describes the broader version: four live online sessions, made up of three 30-minute intensives and a one-hour masterclass, priced at 49 CHF, and naming PARAM-O, Grasshopper, GDL and Python as the places where Archicad automation happens. Our BSS Bootcamp page reached the same point from the data side. Its third module used parameters, property sets and standardised rules to enforce consistent outputs across teams. Both courses came to the same conclusion: the template is where the effort pays off. This session applies that conclusion to one norm, in depth.

←TODAY: In most offices, SIA 400 conformity is still checked by eye, sheet by sheet, before each submission.
→3012: In Zurich-3012, a norm is something a file holds, not something a person has to carry in their head.
Fulcrum: Encoding a standard once is how the people who wrote it actually reach every drawing.

Who it is for

The session is for Archicad users in Swiss offices who produce submission and execution plans: project architects, BIM coordinators who maintain the office template, and the Bauzeichner/innen who do most of the drawing. It suits people who already know their way around Archicad and want their output to be correct by default. The date, agenda and registration are on the session page linked above. Our wider programme also includes the Building System Specialist Title, whose Edition XIV started on 1 September 2026.

Atelier: When a template has never been checked against a norm, small deviations repeat in every project. The most common ones are a pen weight that is slightly off and a sheet title that does not follow the SIA 400 order. AI drafting tools make this worse because they copy whatever the template already contains. Monday move: print one plan sheet from a recently finished project, mark every deviation from SIA 400 in red, and bring that sheet to the session.

Hack: Before you change the template, list every layout in your Layout Book so you know how many sheets your naming convention has to cover. Archicad’s built-in Python connection can read the navigator tree directly. The script below prints the name of each top-level layout so you can compare the list with your SIA 400 title scheme.

from archicad import ACConnection
conn = ACConnection.connect()
acc, act = conn.commands, conn.types
tree = acc.GetNavigatorItemTree(act.NavigatorTreeId('LayoutBook'))
for c in tree.rootItem.children or []: print(c.navigatorItem.name)

The trade-off is simple. An hour spent fixing the template saves many hours of checking sheets, but only if someone in the office looks after that template afterwards. Choose that person before the session, and bring them with you.