JAM Architects: Architectural design

Melbourne, Victoria: For close on 10 years, Melbourne-based JAM Architects has been carving out a name for itself as one of Victoria's more innovative and creative architectural design studios. This, along with a commitment to environment and heritage is evidenced strongly in numerous projects, such as the Observatory Café at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne and a 45,000 square metre mixed use development in Smith Stree, Collingwood.

Having emerged from a legacy of a Windows-centric IT infrastructure, JAM moved to an Apple environment, reaping the benefits of improved performance at the desktop and server, and ridding itself of constant IT management and maintenance requirements.

When business partners Chris Manton and Michael Jan started JAM Architects in 1997, it was almost a given that Windows was to be the company's operating system platform. A few years later, though, with the Australian launch of the Apple PowerMac G4 in 2002, Manton and Jan decided that the time had come to test the water with Apple technology.

"We brought in a Mac and a number of things really stood out," Manton says. "The first was that the CAD software we were using ran seamlessly on the Mac. Secondly, the whole Mac experience was more intuitive and user friendly than what we were used to; and thirdly, the Mac operated faultlessly within our current IT environment."

With those Mac realities plainly obvious to everyone at JAM, a planned upgrade of existing PC workstations to more powerful Windows-based machines was quickly revised to be an upgrade to Apple Macs. "We haven't looked back since," Manton states. "And it didn't take long before our entire business, with one minor exception, was totally Apple."

Speeding on Intel
With the introduction of Intel-based Macs in 2006, JAM Architects couldn't wait to bring in some of the newly released 24-inch 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo iMacs. According to Manton, the dramatic improvement in the new computers' ability to power through calculation-heavy processes was immediately noticeable.

"As opposed to the majority of the architectural community using AutoCAD, we're among the growing number of studios that have adopted ArchiCAD for our work," Manton explains. "One of the main features of ArchiCAD is its strength in 3D modelling, incorporating real world influences such as light and shadow. When the program is rendering models, the amount of calculations being done in the background really test the computer's mathematical processing capabilities.

"When we brought in the new Intel-based iMacs, the time it took to render images was pretty well one of the first things we noticed. In some cases, the time was half what it was taking on earlier models," Manton continues. "For architects, that improvement means that we're spending less time waiting around and more time working on designs."