4D Planning

A building does not exist in only one state. There is what was there before, what exists now, what will be removed, what will remain, what happens temporarily, and what comes next. Corvus makes time a native part of the project, so you can move backward through its history and forward through its future without creating disconnected models, duplicate drawings, or layers of manual coordination. Every state of the project remains part of one continuous record.

Every project has a past and a future.

Design is a sequence of decisions. Construction is a sequence of transformations. Corvus keeps both inside the project. Look backward to understand how the work reached its current state, or look forward to plan how the building will change over time. Instead of treating history, phasing, and sequencing as separate systems, Corvus gives the project one coherent timeline.

Never worry about saving the right version again.

You should not have to interrupt your work to create Project_Final_03_REAL-FINAL before making a risky change. Corvus maintains a complete history of the project automatically, preserving changes as you work and retaining useful historical checkpoints over time. Go back minutes, days, months, or years without managing a parallel archive of manually saved files.

Step backward without losing everything that came afterward.

Undo is useful when the mistake happened thirty seconds ago. Project history needs to work when the decision happened three months ago. Corvus lets you revisit earlier states of the project, inspect what changed, and recover work without treating the entire project as a single disposable version. History becomes something you can navigate rather than a stack of files you are afraid to touch.

Mark the moments worth remembering.

Not every moment in a project matters equally. Mark the scheme presented to the client, the version submitted for pricing, the permit issue, the coordination deadline, the approved mockup, or the moment the client said yes. Named milestones give important states of the project context, so returning to an earlier decision does not require remembering which file, date, or revision happened to contain it.

See exactly what changed between any two moments.

A revision should not require a scavenger hunt. Select two points in the project history and see what was added, removed, moved, resized, reassigned, or otherwise changed between them. Compare yesterday with today, schematic design with design development, the permit set with the current model, or any two milestones you choose. Time should make change more legible, not more difficult to reconstruct.

Know who changed what, and when.

A project develops through thousands of actions by many people. Corvus preserves that history with the work itself. See when an element changed, understand what changed about it, and trace the sequence of decisions that brought it to its current state. The project becomes its own record instead of relying on memory, screenshots, meeting notes, and detective work.

Plan the future as naturally as you document the present.

Looking backward is only half of 4D. Define future phases, milestones, packages, installations, renovations, expansions, or other meaningful states of the project directly within the same model. Future work remains connected to present conditions, making it possible to understand not only what you intend to build, but when each part of that intention becomes real.

Existing. Demolition. Temporary. New. Let the building understand all four.

Renovation should not require separate drawings pretending to be separate buildings. An element can exist, remain, disappear, appear, or exist only temporarily during a particular stage of work. Corvus lets those conditions belong to the element itself, so plans, elevations, sections, models, quantities, and schedules can describe the appropriate state automatically.

A room should not forget what it is because a wall moved.

Spaces change over time too. A room may grow, shrink, merge with another room, change use, disappear, or return in a later phase. Corvus carries spatial identity and information through those changes rather than forcing you to recreate rooms, labels, areas, and schedules at every stage. Change the building and let its spatial information change with it.

Temporary does not mean imaginary.

Construction often creates conditions that exist for weeks or months and matter enormously while they do: temporary partitions, egress paths, barriers, entrances, swing spaces, protection zones, access routes, and interim occupancy conditions. Corvus lets temporary work become a real project state so it can be drawn, measured, coordinated, checked, and communicated like everything else.

Reorder the plan without rebuilding the project.

Real projects do not follow the sequence imagined on day one. Funding changes. Pricing changes. Permits arrive at different times. A client advances one package and postpones another. Move a milestone, rename a phase, split one phase into several, combine phases, or change their order without dismantling the underlying model. The timeline should adapt when the project does.

Compare any two phases, not only the ones next to each other.

Sometimes the important question is not what changed between Phase 1 and Phase 2. It is what changed between existing conditions and Phase 4, between two renovation campaigns five years apart, or between the originally approved plan and the final built condition. Corvus lets you compare the project across any two meaningful moments without overlaying views or constructing a workaround first.

Let quantities understand time.

A door count is only useful if you know which doors you are counting. The same is true for walls, finishes, furniture, areas, materials, equipment, and every other scheduled element. Quantities in Corvus can reflect the state of the project at a particular phase or milestone, making it possible to understand what exists, what is removed, what is added, and what remains at any point in time.

Let every schedule stay in phase.

Changes to the project should flow through its information. Room schedules, finish schedules, door schedules, equipment lists, area calculations, quantities, and worksheets should correspond to the same temporal state as the drawings and model they describe. Stop maintaining parallel phase logic in drawings, schedules, parameters, and spreadsheets just to make the documents agree.

Draw a phase once. See it everywhere.

A demolition plan, reflected ceiling plan, section, elevation, schedule, worksheet, model view, and presentation should not each need their own version of the truth. Define when an object exists and every representation can understand that condition. One temporal model can produce the many views required to explain the work without making you synchronize them manually.

Keep the whole team on the same timeline.

Architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, landscape, interiors, fabrication, and construction information often develops at different speeds, but the project still needs a shared understanding of what happens when. Corvus gives collaborators common milestones and phases so everyone can coordinate against the same project states rather than translating between competing phase structures and file conventions.

Know what the building needs to be while people are still inside it.

Many projects cannot simply empty the building and begin again. Hospitals remain operational. Schools remain occupied. Museums keep galleries open. Offices move people between floors. Homes are renovated around daily life. Plan the sequence of spaces, access, temporary conditions, demolition, and new work so the building can continue functioning while it changes.

Sequence at the scale the project actually requires.

A phase may describe a five-year campus expansion, a six-month renovation, a week of demolition, a two-day equipment installation, or the order in which furniture arrives in a room. Corvus does not force every project into the same temporal resolution. Use broad phases where broad phases are enough, and precise milestones where sequence matters.

Separate what is decided from what is merely possible.

The future is rarely certain all at once. Some work is approved. Some is proposed. Some is deferred. Some depends on funding, permitting, occupancy, or another piece of work happening first. Corvus lets future states carry that context so a long-range plan does not have to masquerade as a fixed construction sequence.

Make dependencies visible before they become problems.

Some work cannot happen until something else does. A temporary entrance has to open before the existing one closes. A tenant must move before demolition begins. Structure has to be complete before an enclosure can follow. Define meaningful relationships between future work so sequence becomes something the project can communicate rather than something someone has to remember.

When the schedule moves, let the project move with it.

A milestone date should not live in one application while the model tells another story. When project timing changes, the affected states, views, quantities, and documentation should remain connected to that change. Corvus turns schedule coordination from a repeated reconciliation exercise into part of the project itself.

Keep the record after the building is built.

The final condition is not the end of the project's usefulness. A complete temporal record can preserve what existed before the work, what was removed, what changed during construction, what ultimately got built, and what has been planned for the future. Years later, the model can still answer questions about the building that would otherwise require searching through archived drawing sets and forgotten folders.

Stop maintaining time by hand.

Architects spend enormous amounts of effort keeping temporal information synchronized: duplicated models, phase parameters, demolition plans, revision clouds, PDF sets, spreadsheets, milestone folders, issue logs, schedules, and file names that all attempt to describe when something was true. Corvus brings that information back into the project. Change the project once, tell it when the change belongs, and let the rest follow.

One project. Every state it has ever had, and every state still to come.

A building changes long before construction begins, throughout the act of building, and for decades afterward. Corvus treats those changes as part of the architecture rather than administrative residue around it. Move backward. Plan forward. Compare any two moments. Coordinate what happens next. The project remains one continuous body of work through time.

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