Solar enters the conversation too late
By the time a solar consultant sees the scheme, the envelope is fixed. Exposure-driven decisions — orientation, shading, glazing ratio — were made without the analysis that would have defended them.
Solutions · Architects
Stop treating solar as an afterthought bolted onto the façade
SolaMaxa gives architectural teams a way to hold solar and BIPV as a genuine design parameter — testing orientation, massing and envelope choices against real exposure, shading and product fit while the building is still malleable.
Workflow emphasisDiscoverAnalyseDesignAssure
The problem
What this work actually looks like today
Numbers you can't trace
Client-facing energy figures often come from vendor claims or spreadsheet shortcuts nobody can reconstruct. The numbers that win the meeting are rarely the numbers that survive design development.
BIM round-trips lose the analysis
Solar results live in a separate tool while the architectural model moves on. Re-entering a revised scheme means re-doing the analysis — so it usually isn't done.
BIPV is pitched as product, not design
Catalogue renders don't answer how a specific curtain wall, spandrel band or canopy performs on your geometry — which is the question the client actually asks.
What changes
With SolaMaxa in the workflow
Solar as a design parameter
Compare massing and envelope decisions against real exposure and shading before the façade is committed — with the analysis derived from your model, not hand-drawn assumptions.
Credible client numbers
Bring explainable generation and carbon figures into client conversations — each one traceable to the geometry, the weather context and the assumptions behind it.
Defensible competition responses
Answer sustainability and energy questions in a bid with numbers you can open up component by component when the jury asks.
Your model stays yours
SolaMaxa augments the architectural model — analysis flows back through explicit human review, and no geometry is silently authored or moved.
Where this is grounded
IFC in, proposal out
The workflow runs from IFC ingestion — with orientation and georeferencing handled — through staged placement scenarios to a branded report whose figures resolve to calculation workpapers. Drawings work too: calibrated reconstruction covers the no-model case.