Autodesk AutoCAD Architecture

About this release

This is the general drafting platform with an architectural toolset layered on top, and the difference that makes is fundamental. A wall drawn here is a wall: it knows its own thickness, its material layers, its base and top height, and it cleans up correctly where it meets another wall. A door placed into it cuts its own opening and stays in the wall when the wall moves. Nothing has to be redrawn because something else changed.

The object catalogue covers the ordinary vocabulary of a building. Walls, doors, windows, curtain walls, stairs, railings, roofs, slabs, structural members and spaces are all parametric styles rather than collections of lines, and a project sets those styles once so every drawing produced from it stays consistent. Changing a door type in the style updates every instance of it across the set.

Documentation follows from the model rather than being drawn separately. Sections and elevations generate and update, schedules of doors, windows, rooms and finishes read their data from the objects themselves so a count is never wrong, and dimensions attach to objects and follow them. Display configurations control what appears at each scale, so a plan at one to fifty and the same plan at one to two hundred show appropriate detail from one drawing.

Everything underneath is still the standard drafting platform. The command line, the layer system, blocks, external references and the whole file format work exactly as they do in the base application, so drawings move to and from consultants who are not running the architectural toolset without translation losses.

What it does

Architectural objects

Walls, doors, windows, stairs and roofs behave as building elements rather than lines.

Automatic wall cleanup

Junctions, corners and intersections resolve correctly as walls move.

Style based standards

Object styles set once and applied across a whole project or office.

Generated documentation

Sections, elevations and schedules read from the model and update with it.

Display configurations

One drawing shows appropriate detail at every output scale.

Standard file compatibility

The base drafting format, so drawings travel to consultants without translation.

Changed in this version

• Faster regeneration on very large building models.
• Improved wall cleanup at complex multi layer junctions.
• New parametric objects added to the standard catalogue.
• Schedule tables gain more flexible formatting.
• External reference handling made more responsive on large sets.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive to a drive with free space for shared components.
2. Close any other drafting application before starting.
3. Run the installer and let the shared components install alongside it.
4. Launch once and set the drawing template and units for the office standard.

Worth knowing before you start

File details