It does not design, and it does not certify compliance.
A two-person Architekturbüro doing residential conversions, a sole practitioner mostly on Bauanträge and Umbauten, and a mid-size office where one partner handles all Ausschreibung and Vergabe. All three trained for years to design, and all three spend most of their week on the paperwork that surrounds design.
For one it is the drawing register — which revision went to whom, and whether the Statiker has the current version. For another it is Angebotsvergleich: seven contractor quotes in seven formats, compared line by line in Excel over a weekend. For the third it is Baustellenprotokolle — forty site photos, an hour of notes, and a document that must be written the same evening or it will not be written at all.
- The drawing register: revisions, issue dates, recipients, current status
- Checking a submission package against the authority’s completeness checklist
- Normalising contractor quotes into one comparable structure, per position
- Site photos plus dictated notes into a structured, dated Protokoll
- Extracting open actions from Protokolle and chasing them
- Locating the relevant clause in DIN, LBO, GEG or the Bebauungsplan
- Drafting the Leistungsverzeichnis skeleton from the design
- Tracking Einwendungsfristen, Nachtragsfristen and Gewährleistung
- The design
- Whether a solution is buildable and good
- Whether a quote is credible, not merely cheapest
- Whether something complies
- The register
- Every drawing, every revision, who received what and when. Small, dull, and it removes an entire recurring anxiety, because "does the Statiker have rev C" becomes a two-second question with an auditable answer.
- The quote normaliser
- Seven PDFs in, one comparison out, per position, with unpriced items flagged as gaps rather than zeros — which is the actual trap in Angebotsvergleich, since the cheapest quote is very often the one that omitted something. It flags. It does not conclude.
- The site protocol pipeline
- On site you photograph and talk. That evening the Protokoll exists: dated, photo-referenced, with defects listed, responsibilities assigned and deadlines extracted into a chase list. The document that used to be written at 22:00 or not at all now needs fifteen minutes of editing.
- The standards finder
- Searches your own library of standards and the Bebauungsplan and returns the passage with its citation. It retrieves. It never paraphrases a norm, because a paraphrased norm is a liability.
- The completeness check
- Before submission, against the authority’s own list. Catches the missing Nachweis before the Bauamt does, which saves weeks.
No generated plans, and never the sentence "this complies".
No massing suggestions, no layout proposals. Not because it cannot produce something plan-shaped, but because the architect’s stamp carries liability and the design is the entire value of the practice. A design produced by a machine and signed by a human is the worst of both.
On compliance it finds the norm and never rules on it. The sentence it is allowed to output is "§34 BauGB, paragraph 2, may apply here — check." The sentence it is never allowed to output is "this complies."
Protokolle written the same day: near 100%. Hours per Angebotsvergleich — a weekend becomes about two hours. Submissions rejected for incompleteness: zero. Time to answer "which revision is current".
When a practice wants generative design tooling. That is a different profession from mine and, for a three-person office doing conversions, it solves a problem they do not have while introducing liability they cannot carry.
Talking on site instead of writing on site.
The Protokoll used to be written at ten at night or not at all, and “not at all” was winning. I photograph and talk on site now, and the same evening the document exists with the photos referenced and the deadlines pulled out. Fifteen minutes of editing instead of two hours of writing. He adopted our folder structure rather than imposing his own, which sounds small and meant we actually kept using it.
Angebotsvergleich was a weekend. Seven quotes in seven formats and I did it in Excel by hand and I was always afraid of missing something. It normalises them by position and flags the unpriced items as gaps rather than as zeros, which is the actual trap — the cheapest quote is usually the one that left something out. It flags and it does not conclude. Two hours now, and the judgement is still mine.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.