Walk into almost any façade contractor’s office and you’ll find a strange contradiction. The architect’s design lives in a detailed 3D model. Yet the façade package that comes out the other end is still hundreds of 2D drawings, a stack of Excel schedules and a lot of manual cross-checking.
That gap is closing. Here’s why the workflow is changing and what it means for everyone on the project.
Why the old way is running out of road
Façades have become harder. More unique panels. More curved and angled geometry. Tighter programmes. And design changes don’t stop when engineering starts.
In a drawing-based workflow, every change means someone redraws, renumbers and rechecks by hand. Errors creep in between the drawing and the schedule, and they tend to be found on site, where they cost the most. Add a shortage of experienced façade draughtsmen, and the manual approach simply doesn’t scale.
The model becomes the single source
In a connected workflow, the 3D model isn’t a presentation tool. It’s the source for everything downstream: panel layouts, part numbers, production drawings, schedules and fabrication data.
Rhino and Grasshopper handle complex geometry. Revit holds the structured building information. A plugin that connects Rhino and Revit lets the two work on the same data without exporting and rebuilding. Change the model, and the documents follow.
Where automation fits in
Standard software gets you a model. It doesn’t divide a façade into manufacturable panels, name them logically or produce shop drawings in the format a fabricator expects. So specialist firms increasingly write their own in-house tools for that layer.
Teams such as Aluvision façade engineering build these tools on top of Revit and Grasshopper, so panel division, drawings and schedules are generated from the model rather than drafted by hand. The engineer’s job doesn’t disappear. It moves from drawing repetitive details to defining the rules the tools follow.
Manufacturers are joining the chain
The next step is already visible. System suppliers such as Schüco publish digital profile catalogues, so a mullion in the model can carry its real article number. When the profile changes, cut lengths and fixing positions update with it.
What it means for each party
- Contractors: fewer drawing revisions and fewer surprises during installation.
- Architects: more freedom in geometry, because complexity is handled by rules, not extra hours.
- Manufacturers: data they can use directly instead of re-entering it from PDFs.
- Developers: a façade package that survives design changes without wrecking the programme.
The question worth asking
For years, the test of a façade partner was “Do you work in BIM?” Today almost everyone does. The better question is: what happens to the data after the model? If the answer is “we draw it again”, the workflow is still stuck in 2D.
