VectorWorks User Wins Belluno Church Bell Tower Design Competition
Columbia, Maryland (July 11, 2007)--Nemetschek North America announced today that Helm & Melacini Architects has won a competition to design a bell tower for San Giovanni Bosco (1815-1888) Church in Belluno, Italy. The bell tower for San Giovanni Bosco will be the first one to be built in the area in several years. What was once an architectural essential component of churches, civil buildings, and educational institutions has become virtually obsolete in modern society.
Helm & Melacini Architects, which has offices in San Diego and Belluno, Italy, used VectorWorks Architect to design and present the competition's winning entry. The firm began by importing a DWG file depicting the church grounds and surrounding properties to use in creating a 3D site plan. The architects imported digital pictures of the building and close-ups of its finish materials, to create a texture representing their choice of materials, to study the relationship of the model to the building, and to determine the best approach to adding a new structure to an existing building.
The final presentation consisted of a 24" x 36" VectorWorks drawing that contained 2D site plans, photo representations of the existing building and proposed bell tower, rendered elevations, and a rendering of the bell tower, as well as a booklet containing the individual elements from the larger sheet.
"We can do so much in just one program with VectorWorks Architect-from basic 2D drawings to presentation materials comprised of a variety of images and text from a variety of file formats," says John Helm, NCARB, principal of Helm & Melacini. "It makes life so much easier when we don't have to learn and use several programs to complete a project. On this project, we were able to easily create the booklet that sold our design, exporting all the elements in our large composite drawing by using the Export Batch PDF command in VectorWorks."
Inspired by le Corbusier, Italian architect Alpago Novello designed the church in the early 1960's. The church serves the local community under the religious order of the Salisians, founded by Don Giovanni Bosco, and is part of an important educational center that includes a preschool, elementary school, and junior high school. The Diocese of the Catholic Church in Belluno, Italy, sponsored the competition to design "un campanile per la chiesa di San Giovanni Bosco."
Nemetschek North America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of European software giant Nemetschek AG. A global leader in design technologies, Nemetschek N.A. has been developing CAD software for the AEC, entertainment, landscape design, and manufacturing fields since 1985. VectorWorks, its flagship product, is one of the world's best-selling cross-platform CAD applications. An all-in-one solution that's easier to learn and use and more cost-effective than most other CAD programs, VectorWorks is ideal for firms that don't have unlimited IT budgets. For more information, visit www.nemetschek.net
Theresa Eckels
Marketing Manager
Nemetschek North America
7150 Riverwood Drive
Columbia, MD 21046
Phone:Â 410-290-5114, ext. 728
Fax:Â 410-290-8050
teckels@nemetschek.net
www.nemetschek.net
