New this year is support for Windows 11 and macOS 26 Tahoe.

The same platform consistency extends to ARES Touch on Apple iOS and Google Android, and, of course, ARES Kudo runs in a modern web browser regardless of operating system. This “One CAD” experience means users can deploy ARES at work on a Windows workstation and continue to work on the go with a M5-based MacBook Pro. It also means schools can run ARES Kudo beautifully on Chromebooks in Chrome, just as effectively as in another modern browser on Windows.

Key Takeaways in this Feature 

• The ARES 2027 CAD ecosystem is the ultimate competitor to Autodesk AutoCAD; ARES products map directly to AutoCAD’s desktop, web, and mobile lineup. 
• ARES 2027 CAD ecosystem distinguishes itself for its AI generative capabilities: AI-assisted block creation, voice input AI features, and A3’s new strengths in “editing” and creating CAD entities, and more.
• ARES uniquely features both BIM-to-DWG automation capabilities, plus extensive cloud-based drawing automation that now works directly from its desktop solutions.
• ARES can now streamline BIM-to-DWG workflows with discipline (A+S+MEP) management control, reflecting how real BIM projects get coordinated, plus full support for Autodesk Forma Data Management (CDE) integration.

These are the big takeaways, but we dive deep into many of these aspects in our Product In-Depth below, plus be sure to read our Closing Remarks and references to other key articles. 

Part One — The AI Pivot

This year, Graebert has pivoted even harder toward AI technologies, though the company has already been at the forefront of AI within the broader CAD market. Architosh has written extensively about ARES in the past, including its A3 AI agent in ARES Kudo. (see: Architosh, “ARES Kudo adds BIM Drawings Automation and AI—Challenges AutoCAD,” 5 May 2027)

Graebert’s aggressive push into AI is not surprising given the rapidly rising importance of artificial intelligence in everyone’s lives. But it is especially critical for Graebert, given competition from its primary rival, Autodesk AutoCAD. For the Berlin-based “middle power” in the CAD world, competing with an industry “super-power” like Autodesk is no easy feat. ARES has managed this by being early, innovative, and aggressive.

The 2027 versions of ARES continue this AI push with new generative AI capabilities and a more even deployment of its AI and automation features across its desktop and web-based platforms. In this article, we explore those advances in detail.

Compatibility Focus

While several major native DWG CAD competitors operate in the broader CAD market, Berlin-based Graebert remains the most direct and interesting “dueling opponent” with Autodesk AutoCAD. This is not to say other competitors lack unique strengths—they do—but Graebert has challenged US-based Autodesk head-on rather than leaning primarily on industry-vertical differentiation. The result has been striking, with AutoCAD displaced inside major companies in Japan and South Korea. (see, Architosh: “ARES and AutoCAD — Locked in Global Duel for DWG Supremancy,” 23 April 2025).

Competing head-on means ARES Commander competes with desktop AutoCAD, ARES Kudo competes with AutoCAD Web, and ARES Touch competes with AutoCAD Mobile.

Both Autodesk and other DWG CAD platforms have introduced AI capabilities that overlap with ARES’s A3 AI-agent features in some areas and diverge in others. This product’s in-depth article, however, focuses on Graebert’s AI features and largely avoids direct comparisons with competitors’ AI capabilities.

Readers curious about Graebert’s AI and automation advancements in the ARES Trinity of CAD solutions should sign up for the company’s June event (see: Graebert neXt event, 3 June 2026 – highly recommended to register here!)

Part Two — AI Highlights

Meet A3—ARES’ AI Assistant

Graebert’s AI agent, called A3, is partially built on OpenAI’s technology—the same technology behind ChatGPT. It was first introduced in March 2024 as part of the desktop solution, while Architosh later covered its arrival in Kudo. (see: Architosh, “ARES Kudo adds BIM Drawings Automation and AI — Challenges AutoCAD,” 30 Mar 2025).

210 – A3 is a marvelous assistant and teacher and will guide the user’s queries about learning or how-to-do commands in ARES products with all possible answers, giving the users an education in both command-line and menu and toolbar-driven workflows. (click on image to expand large, typical all images)

As we noted a year ago, A3 has a commanding knowledge of how ARES products work and can provide step-by-step instructions. When multiple methods are available, A3 provides the steps for each approach. Because I learned this year that OpenAI’s technology powers A3, I asked it how to perform tasks as if I were a CAD user from another platform learning ARES for the first time. (IMAGES 210-211)

211 – Menu highlighting, when paired with A3’s CAD assistance, greatly helps the ARES user (new or veteran) execute commands they may be unfamiliar with.

Unlike Gemini, ChatGPT, or other general AI tools on the Internet, A3 is built directly into ARES. Its instructions are paired with user-interface highlighting, showing users where to find specific menus and tool buttons. This works multiple levels deep: A3 highlights a button, then, after you click it, highlights the next-level button, and so on.

As someone who has used several CAD/BIM/3D tools in professional practice and reviewed dozens more, I can honestly say that moving in and out of different CAD solutions over long periods naturally leads to forgetting how things work. This year, while using A3 to test features, it dawned on me how powerful an AI assistant like A3 can be at minimizing the switching costs of moving from one platform to another.

When starting a new conversation with A3, the assistant provides sample query suggestions, such as “What is a markup?” or “Show me where the hatch feature is.” A regenerate button produces three new suggestions each time. But here is a thought I had: “Why not make these suggestions part of a structured learning path for ARES—especially one aimed at users coming from specific tools such as AutoCAD, Solid Edge, Vectorworks, or BricsCAD?”

MORE: Graebert neXt 2027 Event Page

Given A3’s ability to connect answers to UI highlighting, this seems like a strong future opportunity as AI technology continues to evolve, with training that can provide more structured in-situ guidance and learning lessons.

A3 can also help customize the ARES user interface, answer general concept questions—such as “What is a custom block?”—perform unit conversions, function as a calculator, and respond to industry-specific prompts. For example, it can suggest layer names for an architectural drawing. (IMAGE 214)

214 – Industry knowledge is also a domain specialty of A3 in ARES Commander 2027 and ARES Kudo Professional. I was able to ask A3 to create layers in a blank file and make them conform to an industry standard. A3 prompted me back, asking for clarification on several good points, and with final answers, proceeded to create all the layers I needed in my drawing file. (see IMAGE 215 for results)

After generating an industry-standard layer list for an architectural drawing without interiors, structural, or MEP requirements, the obvious question becomes: wouldn’t it be useful if A3 could actually create all those layers?

In ARES 2027, it can. With one command next to A3, and after about 25 seconds, all my layers were created. (IMAGE 215) Because A3 can create layers from within the context of a chat session, users may naturally wonder whether it can create almost anything in the drawing or inside the ARES user interface.

215 – A3’s ability to create layers was one of the more practical and impressive AI features tested.

The short answer is no. A3 can create entities in a drawing and create items such as layers, but it cannot do everything yet. For example, it cannot change the background color to white or black directly from chat. Instead, it shows you the steps to make user interface changes.

A3 remains particularly strong at locating UI features. This is why I made a point of using A3 more deliberately this year when testing new features in ARES 2027 products. I have to say, A3 seems super solid in helping with the guidance aspects of learning ARES.

New Multi-Task Prompting

New this year in ARES Kudo is A3’s ability to perform “Editing” commands, including the creation of drawing entities. These features were already present in Commander last year and include commands such as selecting all polylines, arcs, or circles in a drawing. Users can also ask A3 to select all lines with a specific lineweight.

A3’s multi-task prompting enables selection and modification in a single prompt. For example, A3 can select all lines with a specific lineweight and change their color to blue. It can select all blocks on a named layer and rotate them by 30 degrees, provided the layer is cited precisely.

In one test file, I asked A3 to select all entities on layer 0—a common cleanup and block-control task—and it performed the task efficiently. (IMAGE 220)

220 – A3 Can select entities on a specific layer, for example, I asked to find any entities on layer 0, and it did that perfectly.

In another test, also executed in ARES Kudo Professional 2027, I asked A3 to select all entities on layer C-MUEBLES and change their line color to yellow. It completed the operation in a single prompt. (see images 221–222, and click on all images to make them large).

221 – Select entities and change their line color, part 1.

222 – Select entities and change their line color, part 2.

Although Graebert does not heavily emphasize this point, A3 can also create elements—not simply select them and perform actions such as changing lineweight. To begin a first line, A3 needs a coordinate point for the start point. In my first test, I supplied both start and end coordinate points for the first two lines and also instructed A3 to assign a specific lineweight and place them on a specific layer. A3 handled this without issue.

In another test, I again provided a coordinate start point for the first line. From there, I could command A3 to create new lines from the start, end, or midpoint of existing lines. It even handled a prompt like this:

“Draw a new line from the midpoint of the second line you created right on the x axis another 15 feet, then up on the y axis to a distance set parallel to the first line. Then draw a new line from the end of that line back to the endpoint of the first line you drew [sic] for me.”

A3 achieved the goal impressively. Notice a few things. First, my prompt contained a grammatical error in the last sentence, but A3 understood the intent. Second, I used natural language expressions such as “draw up,” “a distance set parallel to the first line,” and “the end of that line.” A3 accomplished all of this, including registering distances based on vertex points described in natural language.  (IMAGE 227)

227 – A3 can also create CAD entities. It can draw for you. This kind of capability is very early for AI and CAD, but it strongly suggests a more captivating future of commanding your CAD program to assist in drawing production.

Truthfully, asking A3 to draw these lines is not faster than drawing them manually. But the point of the test was to see how well A3 could interpret plain-language drawing directives. One can imagine using AI itself to create vastly more complex prompts, pasting them into A3, and seeing what happens.

For one final test, I wrote the following prompt in another app and pasted it into A3:

“Begin a line at 5,5,0 and draw that line 20 feet right on the x axis. Next draw a second line down on the y axis 20 feet. Then a third line left on the x axis 15 feet, then a fourth line up on the y axis 6 feet, then from the end of that line draw a line to the start point of the first line. Next draw a line from the midpoint of the first line down on the y axis 10 feet, then begin a new line from that line endpoint to the midpoint of the second line.”

The result was fast. It took exactly 16 seconds to execute the prompt just described and draw the objects, followed by about 2–3 seconds for A3 to describe what it had created inside the A3 palette. (IMAGES 227-228)

I then used A3 to change line colors by referring to the lines in the order they were created, using terms such as “first” and “last.” (IMAGE 228)

228 – A continuation of a more elaborate prompt for A3, described above, with A3 fully understanding terms like “first” and “last” in reference to already AI-produced lines.

While my examples—even the most advanced one—may seem primitive, they represent a shift from manual geometry creation to high-level orchestration: from explicit manual creation, to deterministic tools that follow drawing instructions, to declarative tools where users describe what they want.

New: Voice Interaction in Kudo

In considering the broader implications of deterministic and declarative AI tools in CAD and BIM, voice input could have a meaningful impact on speed. Typing takes time. Speech is often faster.

New in ARES Kudo Professional is the ability to talk to A3 using your voice.

230 – ARES Kudo’s A3 supports voice input. But you must first give it permission.

231 – A view of the voice input in A3’s palette.

Inside Kudo’s A3 palette, users click the microphone button at the bottom. Kudo then asks for microphone permission. (IMAGE 230) Users can speak to A3, which listens and converts speech into written prompts. The user then clicks the arrow button to execute the prompt.

I asked A3 to select all entities on layer 0, then asked it to change that selection’s line color to yellow. (IMAGE 231)

New: Command Recommender in Commander

Another new AI feature is Real-Time Command Recommendation. In the lower-right corner of the ARES interface, the Command Recommender palette lists six commands most likely to be used next. This AI-powered widget is based on Graebert’s own AI engine, using smart algorithms that analyze user interactions and command history in real time.

240 – The AI Commander Recommender is in the lower right of this image. This feature is handy, and we understand it will continue to advance. It is based on Graebert’s own AI technology.

In one 2D workflow, I created a series of lines forming a closed, complex triangular shape. The Command Recommender suggested likely next commands such as Delete, Move, Pan, Hatch, and Rotate. I selected Rotate and performed the command, after which the recommendation list changed. Some commands, like Pan, appear to remain in the palette continuously, but overall, this new feature seems quite useful.

New: AI Text Tools

New this year in ARES Kudo Professional, and previously available in Commander, Kudo’s MText editor now includes AI-driven tools for translation, writing refinement, spell checking, and summarization.

Users can access these AI abilities with Note and SimpleNote entities. This differs from using A3 to translate text, though A3 is also fully capable of doing so.

New: AI-Assisted Block Generation

One of the more intriguing AI uses in ARES this year is AI-assisted block generation. This rapidly evolving feature is part of A3’s cloud-based technology. Because it runs in the cloud, Graebert can deploy the same AI capability to both the desktop-based Commander solution and the browser-based Kudo solution. (IMAGE 250)

250 – AI-assisted block generation is “generative AI” inside ARES. This technology is highly useful for certain kinds of things you must draw.

The AI responds to “prompt descriptions” of the desired block and generates three versions. These initial results are non-vector graphics. The user selects the preferred option, saves it as a block, names it, and the AI translates it into a vector CAD object. (see IMAGES 251 – 252)

251 – Asking A3 inside the Trinity Block library to generate a Land Rover in top and side view.

252 – The finished product, the new AI-generated block of a Land Rover.

AI-assisted block generation appears best suited for complex elements such as furniture, site objects, trees, or cars in architectural drawings—items that can be time-consuming to create manually. Importantly, the process in ARES 2027 is generative and appears to create geometry in a “unit-less” environment. When the block is placed into the drawing, users can scale it before final placement, in addition to the normal block-insertion options.

Looking across the AI features in the ARES 2027 ecosystem, Graebert has further differentiated itself from DWG CAD rivals by positioning ARES as an AI-generative CAD leader, while A3 remains strong as an AI-driven assistant. These are two distinct sides of AI in CAD, and both benefit the user.

Part Three — BIM, Automation, and Cloud Processing

Online Drawings Automation — Now in Commander

While AI assistance helps users learn and get more out of CAD software, and generative AI helps users create content faster, Drawings Automation represents another major facet of Graebert’s competitive differentiation from Autodesk.

This year, the online automation features shown in ARES Kudo last year have come to ARES Commander. While the specific functions—such as DWG Drawing Compare—can be performed manually, online automation offers several key benefits:

• Server-based processing — saving the local computer from being tied up during the process, so users can continue working.
• Batch processing — enabling many files to be processed at once, with email notification when complete.
• Scheduling — allowing single or multiple tasks to run at specific dates and times, such as after work hours.
• Recurring jobs — enabling repeated processes, such as converting a DWG file to PDF every night and saving it to a chosen cloud storage provider.

Drawing automation processes include:

• DWG Drawing Compare
• DWG Data Extraction
• DWG Export to DWF, DWFX, JPG, PNG, SLD, SVG, or TIF
• Convert DWG to PDF
• Convert PDF to DWG
• Convert DWG to DGN — MicroStation format
• Convert DGN to DWG
• Print Sheet Sets (.DST) to PDF — (A new automation this year!)

To access Drawings Automation, users go to File > Online Automation. The automation dialog opens, where users select the desired process. (see list above and IMAGE 260)

260 – The Menus method to activate drawings automations in ARES Commander 2027. You can also activate from the Cloud palette, which is also where you can implement the BIM-to-DWG automation process.

The first automation I tested was DWG to DGN, configured as a recurring scheduled conversion. I then performed an immediate DWG-to-PDF conversion. The automation job status appears on the right, while an Open in Browser button opens the automation jobs in the ARES Kudo cloud system. (see IMAGES 261-262)

261 – Inside the drawings automation settings window. This is where you select your particular setup for your automation process.

We covered this window in detail last year as part of our ARES Kudo focus. (see, Architosh: “ARES Kudo adds BIM Drawings Automation and AI — Challenges AutoCAD,” 30 Mar 2025) Drawings Automation Jobs are listed with their template, job ID, status, creation time, and actions column. The status column provides a color-coded indicator, while recurring jobs are marked in orange in the template column. (see IMAGE 262)

262 – Automations in progress with status indicators and more. This window’s functionality largely remains the same this year.

Users can also initiate drawing automation from the Cloud Storage palette. Right-clicking a selected file opens a drop-down menu with the same output options for Drawings Automation, including BIM-to-DWG automations.

Finally, ARES automations can notify users when a process is complete. In the images above, note the checkbox for email notification. This is what the resulting email looks like in your inbox. (IMAGE 263)

263 – Email notification that your drawings automation process is complete.

One final note: a new automation job type this year is Print Sheet Set (.DST) to PDF.

Advanced BIM-To-DWG: Multi-Discipline Support

One of Graebert’s unique features in ARES Commander has been its ability to ingest BIM files—Revit and IFC—and automatically create DWG drawings for documentation. For example, an MEP engineer working in 2D CAD with ARES Commander may receive a Revit model from an architect. The engineer can use ARES Commander to automatically create floor plans, exterior elevations, and sections, then develop MEP construction plans from those DWG files.

In previous versions, each new BIM file received from a project stakeholder or collaborator produced separate plans, generating redundancy. Now, ARES Commander manages linked BIM models from different disciplines as part of an integrated project. Users can also configure drawing generation to include only selected disciplines, such as Architectural + Structural or Architectural + MEP.

This better reflects real-world BIM coordination workflows based on federated model coordination. And a few final points. ARES 2027 this year supports Revit formats from 2011 through 2026. And it also works with IFC files. (see also Forma Integration section below).

Smart Linking

Also new in 2027 is Smart Linking technology, which optimizes path management for external references, or XREFs. ARES now alerts users when critical location changes affect referenced drawings. This provides a more proactive way to manage broken links before they impact workflows. Few things are as frustrating as broken references right when a drawing must be printed.

Part Four — Collaboration and Performance

ARES has strong collaboration features thanks to its Trinity concept, which enables cloud-connected workflows linking desktop, web, and mobile for better teamwork. Teammates can be on site using ARES Touch, adding input to files that colleagues can immediately address back in the office.

Across devices and operating systems, ARES offers multi-user collaboration with solid session handling, version control, password-protected and date-limited file sharing, plus commenting and markup features that include voice notes, stamps, and photos from mobile devices. You can read more here. (see, Architosh: “ARES Trinity — A Review of the Industry Leading DWG CAD Software,” 2 Mar 2023)

Autodesk Forma Integration

This year, the ARES 2027 ecosystem adds integration with Autodesk Forma Data Management, formerly Autodesk Construction Cloud. Like other cloud systems, Autodesk’s CDE—common data environment—can now store ARES DWG files. Users connect to Autodesk Forma from the Cloud Storage palette in Commander or through the ARES Kudo web interface.

300 – Autodesk Forma integration.

Importantly, the Drawings Automation tools discussed earlier also work with files stored on Autodesk Forma Data Management. This includes automation of DWG drawings from Revit models in ARES BIM-to-DWG workflows. It also includes ARES’ BIM-to-DWG automation features. Revit files stored in Forma Data Management (FDM) can be linked to the BIM-to-DWG automation in ARES. When BIMRELOAD automates ARES, it produces new DWG files from the BIM model, and it can do this each time the BIM model is updated or whenever the automation is desired.

ARES Kudo Professional 2027 also supports connectivity to Autodesk Forma directly in the browser, including the free version, which supports viewing and commenting on files stored in Forma.

Drawing Insights in Kudo

Introduced this year, Drawing Insights helps users understand which collaborators have worked on files. Users can see who accessed, renamed, or shared a file. (IMAGE 310)

310 – Drawings Insights is a new feature this year in ARES Kudo Professional.

When a file is modified, Drawing Insights notes who modified it and the specific day and time.

Speed Gains

This year, Graebert says ARES Commander 2027 is dramatically faster than last year’s version. COPY operations are up to 50 percent faster, and version 2027 opens files up to 20 percent faster. The most noticeable gains, however, may come from 9–25 percent faster navigation.

For readers’ edification, in the CAD/BIM industry, the thresholds for perceived performance roughly break down as follows:

• Less than 10 percent — users may feel “placebo” speed gains; improvements are largely imperceptible.
• 15 percent — users notice gains in heavy commands, complex REGEN operations, or 3DORBIT workflows, but overall productivity rhythm remains similar.
• 20 percent — the “aha moment” or industry benchmark, where responsiveness becomes clearly noticeable.
• 50 percent or higher — transformative, often comparable to replacing a three-year-old workstation in the 1990s and 2000s.

This means ARES Commander 2027 delivers performance improvements at or above the “aha moment” level, especially on large and very large files. The larger the work, the more users will feel the gains. Zooming and panning are up to 20 percent faster on large drawings.

Commander 2027 also introduces extended multi-threading for SAVE, AutoSave, and CLOSE operations. These commands now run in the background instead of blocking the user interface.

AI and Admin Controls

A final note concerns collaboration within teams and organizations. Graebert has introduced a centralized administration layer for all AI features, addressing the primary concerns of enterprise CAD environments: security, privacy, and cost.

Area Note

AREANOTE was first released in ARES Commander 2027 SP0, was previously available in ARES Touch, and is now available in ARES Kudo.

The tool gives users a simple way to calculate areas quickly and represent them with color and variable transparency. Area regions can also be named, and their calculated area displayed, with user control over variables such as font size, color, and transparency.

500 – AREANOTE is a new command for ARES Kudo Professional that allows the user to quickly calculate areas and represent them in color regions.

The image above shows the new feature in ARES Kudo Professional 2027, but the tool works the same way across ARES products.

Competing with LT — Support for Print Styles in ARES Kudo

We have written in the past that Graebert views ARES Kudo not as a competitor to AutoCAD Web, but as a full-blooded competitor to AutoCAD LT. Why? Two reasons. First, Kudo is far more feature-rich than AutoCAD Web. Second, Kudo is so feature-complete that, despite running in the browser, it essentially matches AutoCAD LT’s capabilities.

When these two products compete, ARES Kudo scores points by being cloud-hosted and offering cloud-specific features. AutoCAD LT scores points by handling much larger files faster, since it is not browser-based. But Kudo previously had one workflow disadvantage: no support for print styles. In ARES Kudo Professional, print styles are now supported.

ARES Kudo users can now take advantage of the new Print Dialog box, including print style support. With print styles, users can maintain one set of line colors for optimal screen contrast and another set for PDF-based printing.

Because AutoCAD LT supports equivalent plot style systems—CTB and STB—this was previously one disadvantage for ARES Kudo when competing for LT users. ARES Kudo Professional now supports both color-dependent CTB and named STB plot styles. It can create these styles anew and also ingest existing (.CTB) and (.STB) files from AutoCAD, helping ensure printed PDFs look as intended from the original AutoCAD setup.

ARES Kudo Professional lets users create, edit, and manage print styles—just like LT—not merely apply them, as in AutoCAD Web.

Finally, ARES Commander can now export drawings in STEP format, not just import STEP. This round-trip capability strengthens workflows involving SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, PTC Onshape, and other MCAD systems.

Closing Remarks

ARES 2027 shows Graebert continuing to sharpen its “Trinity” strategy around a unified CAD experience across desktop, web, and mobile. The practical value of this approach is not merely platform breadth, but workflow continuity: users can move between Commander, Kudo, and Touch with a consistent DWG-centric experience. That remains one of ARES’s strongest differentiators, especially for organizations that need flexibility across Windows, macOS, Linux, browsers, tablets, and mobile devices.

The larger story in this release, however, is AI. A3 is no longer just a help assistant that explains commands or points users toward interface elements. In ARES 2027, it increasingly becomes an active participant in the CAD workflow—selecting entities, modifying geometry, creating layers, responding to multi-step prompts, and even supporting voice-driven interaction in Kudo. AI-assisted block generation pushes this further by moving Graebert into generative CAD territory, where natural-language prompts can produce reusable vector-based drawing content.

ARES 2027 also strengthens Graebert’s competitive position through automation and BIM-to-DWG workflows. Bringing online Drawings Automation into Commander gives desktop users access to server-based batch processing, scheduling, recurring jobs, format conversion, and sheet-set PDF output without tying up local machines. Meanwhile, advanced BIM-to-DWG improvements—especially multi-discipline support and Smart Linking—make ARES more relevant to real-world federated BIM coordination workflows where not every participant works natively inside a BIM authoring tool.

Taken together, ARES 2027 is not a single-feature release but a strategic one. It advances AI, cloud automation, BIM interoperability, collaboration, performance, and Kudo’s ability to compete more directly with AutoCAD LT. Graebert remains a smaller player than Autodesk, but ARES 2027 demonstrates how a focused competitor can move quickly, differentiate boldly, and continue expanding what native DWG CAD can become in an AI-accelerated, cloud-connected era.

The post ARES 2027 Deep Dive: AI, Automation and BIM-to-DWG Workflows appeared first on Architosh.

Our full conversation is available on our Architosh Official YouTube channel, but several themes emerged that deserve a closer look through the lens of architectural practice and the specific evolution of the machines that built our world.

The Architecture of a Collection

“Back in the day, in order to buy your next Mac, you had to sell the previous one,” Pann recalls, reflecting on the humble origins of what has become a staggering personal archive.

For many architects, the Mac was never just a tool; it was a capital investment. Pann’s collection—spanning over 73 machines—began almost by accident, fueled by a meticulous habit of preservation. “I always kept everything—the boxes, the manuals, everything in pristine condition,” he says. This attention to detail eventually yielded high resale values, allowing him to bootstrap his way through Apple’s evolving product cycles.

Architect Neal Pann, co-founder of podcast Archispeak, creator of Apple for Architects, has a vast 73 machine collection of Apple computers, including a NeXTstation. We talk about this collection–and a range of Macs in Architecture issues–in the ToshTalk video interview above.

As Pann’s career (and studio space) grew, the need to sell faded, giving way to a desire to preserve the industrial design that mirrored his own professional values. “I appreciated not only the operating system and its simplicity, but the design of the computers themselves. They were pieces of art,” Pann notes, echoing a sentiment that traces back to the Jony Ive era and the celebrated monograph, Apple Design.

A Symbolic Totem: From the SE to the Twentieth Anniversary

Every collection has its “Patient Zero.” For Pann, it is the Macintosh 512k—the very machine he used in an architect’s office straight out of high school. In a poetic gesture, the computer now sits atop a classical architectural column in his studio. It is a striking visual metaphor: the “New Order” of digital drafting literally supported by the “Old Order” of classical tradition.

From that SE, the collection scales the heights of Apple’s hits and misses, including several rare “halo” products:

• The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM): A rare, integrated system that Pann still keeps in its original box.
• The Power Mac G4 Cube: A masterpiece of miniaturization that, despite its market failure, remains a pinnacle of Apple’s aesthetic ambition.
• The iMac G3 Era: His collection includes a “Dalmation Blue” iMac and a near-complete rainbow of the original fruit-colored units.

As we can see from the images in this article, Pann’s collection includes nearly the full rainbow of colors that the famous iMac G3 came in.

The Professional “Muscle”: Towers and Portables

For the practicing architect, the collection highlights the machines that actually did the heavy lifting of CAD and early 3D rendering. Pann’s archive includes the “muscle” towers that defined the professional workstation for decades:

• The Quadra & early PowerPC Era: His collection features the Power Macintosh 8600/200 in the Quadra 800 form factor and the Power Macintosh 9500/AV, marking the industry’s pivot from Motorola 68k chips to the PowerPC architecture.
• The G3 & G4 Towers: From the “side-saddle” beige Power Macintosh G3 to the iconic “Blue and White” G3 with its easy-access fold-down door—a design godsend for architects adding RAM or storage.
• The G5 & Beyond: The aluminum Power Mac G5 towers led into the Intel era, eventually leading to the infamous 2013 Mac Pro “trashcan” cylinder and a few Intel Xeon-based Mac Pros.

The portable history is equally represented, featuring the Titanium MacBook Pro, the original clamshell iBook (1998), and a wide array of PowerBooks that allowed the “mobile architect” to take their studio to the job site.

NeXT and the Lisa: The DNA of macOS

Not all of Pann’s collection bears the Apple logo. He also possesses a NeXTstation (1990), the sleek black hardware that Steve Jobs built during his “exile.” Beside it sits the NeXT Laser Printer, a reminder of Jobs’ obsession with high-fidelity output.

Power Macs sit below a collection of 1998 iMacs.

The PowerBook in various models.

Pann’s NeXTstation computer and NeXT Laser Printer.

The collection also pays homage to the Apple Lisa 2 (1984 variant). Often described as Apple’s “best failure,” the Lisa used Sony 3.5-inch floppy drives and introduced technologies like QuickDraw and Object Pascal. However, it remained a document-centric machine, whereas the Mac would eventually win the day by being application-centric, but more importantly, vastly less expensive.

The “Apple for Architects” Legacy

Pann’s evangelism isn’t just about silicon and aluminum; it’s about community. When he launched Apple for Architects in the early “teens,” he effectively took up the mantle of Architosh’s original mission during a period when the “Mac in AEC” story was in flux.

The Macintosh 512k sits on an architectural column.

Apple Lisa 2 its above the NeXTstation.

1998 iBooks in a range of colors.

Through his Inside The Apple Studio podcast and his online galleries, Pann created a space where architects could “relive a kind of nostalgia,” as he puts it. It wasn’t just about hardware specs; it was about the shared experience of “lusting after” a machine that promised a more elegant way to work. And it was also, as he puts it, a bit of fun to see how other Mac-using architects created their workspaces and what Apple tech they used to get their practice done, on both the hardware and software sides.

Conclusion: The Ultimate Personification

As we look toward the next 50 years, Pann asks a rhetorical question: Where does Apple go from here?

The Power Mac G4 Cube was Apple’s most stunning when released by Steve Jobs’ gorgeous creation was a market failure. It’s successor the ill-fated 2013 trash can Mac Pro in black.

His hope is for a return to the foundational ethos: “The Computer for the Rest of Us.” In Pann’s view, the iPhone is the ultimate personification of that goal—a device that democratizes complex technology through superior design. For the architectural community, Neal Pann remains a vital curator of that history, reminding us that the machines we use are not just appliances, but milestones in our own creative journeys.

The post The Curator of the “Computer for the Rest of Us”: Neal Pann and the Apple AEC Connection appeared first on Architosh.

Architosh entered that story in 1999, during one of Apple’s darkest periods. At the time, the Mac’s future was still uncertain, and so was its position in architecture. The site was founded for a practical reason: to support architects using the Mac and to challenge two persistent claims—that there was no serious software for architects on macOS, and that serious architecture firms had already abandoned the platform. Both claims were grossly overstated. The Mac was still present in architecture, still valued in design culture, and still deeply relevant in many firms and cities. But the platform’s standing was under pressure, and the software ecosystem gaps were real.

That tension has defined Apple’s relationship with AEC for decades. Again and again, Apple has produced compelling hardware, excellent graphics capabilities, strong industrial design, and, at key moments, world-class performance. But in architecture and construction, hardware alone has never been enough. AEC has always been shaped by workflows, standards, ecosystem momentum, and above all by the availability of indispensable applications. That has been Apple’s enduring challenge in this market.

The Conditions That Gave Rise to Architosh

When Architosh launched in February 1999, the immediate mission was straightforward: provide a serious resource for architects using the Mac. That mission emerged from direct experience inside practice. In the late 1990s, it was still common to encounter architecture firms running Macs, especially in cities and regions where Apple had stronger market penetration due to adjacent industries such as publishing, academia, media, and the creative professions. Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and New York all had strong Mac constituencies, and architecture often reflected those broader local conditions.

In Boston, for example, firms like Koetter Kim & Associates (where this author practiced) practiced on Macs, and the city’s concentration of colleges, publishing, and scientific institutions created a natural environment for Apple. Yet even there, by the late 1990s, Apple’s instability had become a source of anxiety. Firms that preferred the Mac increasingly had to ask whether that preference remained sustainable.

An image of the DPG from Architosh’s older site (still on the web). Though no longer updated, the guide is still available, just click on the image.

Architosh was born out of that atmosphere. Early on, the publication functioned as a rebuttal in practical form. Its Digital Practice Guide catalogued the software and hardware that architects could actually use on the Mac. Its community pages and forum helped document something equally important: there was, in fact, a real international base of architects and firms still committed to Apple’s platform. By 2003, that community included hundreds of firms and thousands of forum participants. Architosh did not invent the Mac in architecture. It simply made visible a community that already existed and argued that its needs were being underestimated.

Apple’s Place in Professional Computing

Apple’s larger history is well known. Founded in 1976, it helped launch the personal computer revolution with the Apple II and then fundamentally reshaped personal computing with the Macintosh in 1984. But Apple’s importance in AEC has never depended on nostalgia. It has depended on whether the company could offer the right combination of usability, graphics capability, performance, and software support for professional practice.

In the early Mac era, Apple’s advantage was never just raw computing power. The Macintosh distinguished itself through user experience, visual sophistication, and a model of computing that was attractive to designers. Even when Motorola-based Macs struggled to keep up with Intel on performance, Apple maintained a strong identity among creative professionals. That mattered in architecture, where affinity for design tools, interfaces, and visual computing has always been stronger than in many other verticals.

The PowerPC era meant industry-leading performance and PowerPC chips would continually eclipse Intel in a massive rivalry for years to come. The Power Macintosh 7200, shown here, was popular in architecture, engineering, science, medicine, and publishing and graphics. (IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons, Benoit Prieur).

The PowerPC transition in the mid-1990s gave Apple a more credible performance story and renewed professional interest. But the larger industry momentum behind Windows 95 and the exploding Windows software ecosystem undercut that advantage. The rise of the web, the standardization around Microsoft, and Apple’s broader corporate instability pushed the Mac toward irrelevance in many business categories, including parts of AEC.

Steve Jobs’s return in 1997 saved Apple, and the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and later Apple Watch transformed the company into one of the world’s most powerful consumer technology firms. Yet Apple’s resurgence did not automatically solve its standing in professional computing. If anything, it complicated it. The company became stronger financially while becoming less dependent on the Mac, and many pro users began to feel that Apple’s attention was drifting away from their needs.

Autodesk, AutoCAD, and the First Great Break

No company mattered more to the Mac’s fate in architecture than Autodesk. The abandonment of AutoCAD on the Mac was one of the defining events in Apple’s AEC story.

Autodesk’s departure from the Mac in the mid-90s was not caused by one issue alone, but the timing was especially damaging. AutoCAD Release 12 for the Mac did not arrive under ideal conditions, and the broader transition period around PowerPC did not help. The troubled Release 13 era further weakened confidence. Autodesk eventually consolidated around Windows and abandoned not only the Mac version of AutoCAD but also other non-Windows versions. For architects and firms already under pressure to standardize, this mattered enormously.

It is worth asking, in hindsight, whether things might have gone differently. A strong, well-received PowerPC-native AutoCAD could have helped stabilize a substantial Mac user base in architecture at a critical moment. Instead, Mac AutoCAD users were left frustrated, and Windows gained further momentum as the default professional environment.

When Autodesk eventually returned to the Mac with AutoCAD in 2010, the market response was positive. The return validated something Architosh had argued for years: there was still meaningful demand for serious AEC software on Apple hardware, and a Mac version could attract real users rather than merely cannibalize existing Windows seats.

Apple’s Own Failures in AEC

Autodesk was not the only company to misread the moment. Apple also bears responsibility for its longstanding weakness in architecture and construction.

Architosh’s open petition for AutoCAD on the Mac collected thousands of responses, demonstrating substantial demand. Apple understood that critical applications were essential to growing market share in verticals like architecture. Executives knew the problem. The question was what Apple would do about it. In practice, it did too little.

This remains one of the great strategic failures in Apple’s professional history. The company often emphasized the Mac’s design, ease of use, graphics strengths, and later performance benefits, but it consistently underestimated how much market power resided in application ecosystems. In AEC, users do not choose platforms in a vacuum. They choose workflows, file compatibility, standards, consultants, contractors, and hiring pools. When a few essential applications dominate the industry, superior hardware is not enough, “technical interrelatedness” becomes a dominant market force. (see, Architosh, “The Revit Open Letter Through the Lens of QWERTY-Nomics,” 20 Oct 2022)

Apple should have spent more, pushed harder, and taken a longer view in helping bring critical professional software to the Mac. Instead, it too often behaved as though the platform’s inherent strengths would be persuasive on their own. In architecture, they were not.

Three recurring weaknesses hurt Apple’s position in AEC.

The first was cost. Apple did not always appreciate how closely professional buyers scrutinize price-performance ratios. Mac systems were often attractive and sometimes faster, but they were frequently more expensive at the high end, especially in ways that mattered to firms managing many seats.

The second was flexibility. Apple’s best systems were often elegant but constrained. Upgradability, GPU options, and broader hardware configurability mattered in pro markets, and Apple was not always willing to meet those needs halfway. Its long-running distance from Nvidia and CUDA only reinforced the perception that Apple prioritized its own product philosophy over the practical demands of pro workflows.

The third—and by far the most important—was ecosystem blindness. Apple repeatedly failed to grasp that without critical applications, the Mac’s industrial design, performance, and management advantages would never translate into broad adoption in architecture. In AEC, ecosystem gaps are not minor inconveniences. They are deal-breakers.

Misreadings Beyond Apple

Others also misread the Mac opportunity. In 2003, Architosh and Cyon Research jointly released a white paper advocating for AutoCAD’s return to the Mac. Yet the conclusions associated with that effort underestimated the growth potential of a renewed Mac AutoCAD market. The argument that a port would make little financial sense if existing users could already run Windows software on Apple hardware now looks too narrow.

The flaw in that thinking was a failure of imagination. It focused too heavily on whether Autodesk would merely retain existing users rather than expand into adjacent markets. But that overlooked the possibility that a modern Mac AutoCAD could open new seats, new design-oriented user segments, and new areas such as corporate architecture, interiors, and brand-driven retail design. In the years that followed, Autodesk’s own experience suggested the Mac version did indeed find new users and succeed on its own terms.

That miscalculation was part of a larger pattern. Time and again, key players in the industry treated the Mac as a legacy niche rather than a platform capable of renewed relevance under the right conditions and capable of software license expansion, not just Windows seat cannibalization.

Architosh’s Own Evolution

Architosh also changed course over time. Once Apple’s survival was no longer in doubt, in 2008, the publication moved away from its original community-centered advocacy role and toward broader, vendor-neutral coverage of AEC technology. That shift made sense editorially. The site grew into a widely respected publication covering the global AEC software landscape across platforms, devices, cloud applications, and emerging workflows.

But something was lost in the transition. As Apple receded from explicit focus, so too did the sense that there was a visible, organized Mac community in architecture worth serving and defending. In hindsight, Architosh’s move away from community-building may also have signaled that the long fight for the Mac in architecture had entered a quieter phase, or perhaps a less hopeful one.

Still, that evolution mirrored the market itself. By the 2010s, the most important AEC story was no longer whether the Mac had a constituency. It was whether Apple could remain relevant while the software center of gravity in the industry moved decisively elsewhere.

The Rise of Revit and the New Strategic Problem

That elsewhere was Revit.

If AutoCAD’s departure was the first major break in Apple’s AEC story, the rise of Revit was the deeper long-term challenge. While Apple was succeeding brilliantly in consumer electronics—and while the iPad was becoming enormously influential on construction sites—Revit was consolidating its place as the dominant BIM platform across much of the industry.

This mattered more than any single hardware cycle. By the early 2010s, architecture and construction were increasingly being shaped not just by drafting tools but by BIM-centered workflows, and Revit sat at the center of that shift. A Windows-only application was becoming the defining platform of modern AEC production.

Revit’s importance also reshaped the Mac debate. The question was no longer simply whether Apple could recover lost ground through general design affinity or improved hardware. The question became whether the Mac could remain strategically viable in architecture without native access to the industry’s most important BIM environment.

Even Autodesk seemed aware of the pressure. Revit was long one of the most requested Autodesk applications for the Mac. When the Open Letter controversies emerged in 2020, Architosh became a central publication covering the fallout and the wider questions about Revit’s future. Although those debates were not primarily about the Mac, they once again exposed an important truth: the long-term future of AEC platforms could not be discussed without also discussing Apple.

The “Pro” Problem at Apple

Unfortunately, these years also coincided with one of Apple’s weakest periods in professional desktop strategy. From 2013 to 2019, pro users endured the notoriously compromised “trash can” Mac Pro or were pushed toward less ideal alternatives such as iMacs. Many creative professionals came to believe that Apple had forgotten the needs of high-end users entirely.

The famous Phil Schiller moment when he said “can’t innovate anymore my ass” during the 2013 launch of the ill-fated Mac Pro.

That criticism was not limited to AEC, but architecture felt it acutely. CAD and BIM users care deeply about responsiveness, reliability, graphics, and raw compute performance. They also care about stability and about confidence that the platform vendor actually understands professional demands. During this period, Apple did little to reassure them.

Then Apple Silicon arrived.

Apple Silicon and the Return of Possibility

The transition to Apple Silicon in 2020 changed the conversation more dramatically than anything Apple had done for the Mac in years. Once again, Apple forced developers through a processor transition. But this time the shift was welcomed because the underlying technology was so compelling.

One More Thing. The special event in November 2020 when Apple introduced Apple Silicon for the Mac.

Apple Silicon brought exceptional performance per watt, outstanding integration, and industry-leading single-core performance. For AEC users, that last point matters enormously. Nearly all CAD and BIM workloads continue to benefit heavily from strong single-threaded responsiveness even in a multicore world. For the first time in a long time, Apple did not merely have an elegant or attractive machine for architects. It had a machine with a serious and sustained technical advantage in the kind of performance many design applications value most.

This created a new strategic opening.

The first possibility is ecosystem convergence through ARM. As Microsoft and the broader Windows ecosystem push more deeply into ARM, software vendors may find it easier to bring applications to macOS because the architectural gap between platforms narrows. In that scenario, the Apple Silicon era could become something like a second chance for the Mac in AEC—similar in strategic importance to the Intel transition, but potentially larger in consequence.

MORE: End of an Era: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future

The second possibility is more paradoxical. Apple Silicon has become so powerful that running Windows applications in virtualization can be surprisingly viable. In some cases, the Mac’s raw performance advantage can offset the virtualization penalty enough to make Windows software usable at an impressive level. That raises a provocative question: if Windows applications already run well enough on powerful Macs, will some vendors decide there is still no need to port?

That tension captures the current moment. Apple now has the strongest technical case for the Mac in years, perhaps ever, yet the software question remains unresolved.

Performance, Trajectory, and Meaning

There is a temptation to reduce Apple Silicon’s significance to benchmark bragging rights, but the larger point is more practical. Apple now has something it has rarely possessed so clearly in its competition with Wintel: not just design appeal or efficiency, but a credible claim to sustained leadership in the performance characteristics that matter to many professional users.

Single-core gains are not abstract in CAD and BIM. They are felt decisively in responsiveness, regeneration speed, modeling fluidity, and the general sense that software is reacting instantly rather than grudgingly. In the world of design tools, that matters immensely.

Apple’s performance trajectory in recent years suggests that the company may maintain a meaningful advantage for years, particularly if future chip generations continue to widen the gap or even simply preserve it. If so, the historical contradiction at the center of this article becomes harder to ignore. The Mac may now offer some of the most compelling hardware in the world for certain AEC workloads at precisely the moment when the industry’s most essential software remains largely tied to Windows.

That is not just ironic. It is strategically unsustainable.

The Question at 50

At 50, Apple has the strongest silicon story in the history of the Mac and, in many respects, the best hardware case it has ever had for serious design and professional computing. Yet in AEC the central contradiction remains. Some of the most attractive hardware for CAD, 3D, and BIM still lacks native access to some of the industry’s most important software.

This has been Apple’s long struggle in architecture. The company has never had much trouble convincing architects that the Mac is desirable. It has repeatedly struggled to convince the software industry that the platform is too important to ignore.

The MacBook Pro features the latest Apple Silicon M5, M5 Pro and M5 Max, offering the computer industry’s leading single-core processing speeds, ideal for CAD and BIM applications. In this image we can see Vectorworks Architect 2026 fully native for macOS and leveraging Apple Silicon accelerated technologies.

That challenge has defined every major phase of Apple’s relationship with AEC—from the early Mac years, to the loss of AutoCAD, to the rise of Revit, to the current Apple Silicon era. The details have changed, but the basic conflict has not: Apple keeps building machines that make sense for designers, while the industry’s software center of gravity remains elsewhere.

If that finally changes, Apple’s next era in architecture could look very different from its first 50 years. If it does not, Apple will remain what it has so often been in AEC: the maker of extraordinary machines standing just outside the industry’s most important doors.

Postscript

A final note is necessary here. To speak of Apple’s long software struggle in AEC is not to say that the Mac lacks serious architectural tools. It does not. Archicad and Vectorworks, both part of the Nemetschek Group, have for years stood as powerful native alternatives on macOS—competitive with Revit, and in important respects ahead of it. They remind us that the Mac story in architecture is not only a story of absence and missed opportunity. It is also a story of enduring strengths, loyal developer support, and software makers that recognized long ago that architects on the Mac were worth building for.

That point extends beyond BIM authoring tools alone. The Mac has long been exceptionally well served in 3D modeling and visualization, with leading solutions across those domains running natively and running well on macOS. These remain among the most important parts of the design pipeline: the tools that help win work, shape design intent, and carry projects toward final resolution. Even many Revit-based firms rely heavily on such tools in these phases, especially Trimble SketchUp and McNeel’s Rhino and Grasshopper, the latter of which remain deeply embedded in architecture schools and design-forward practices around the world. All of these tools run beautifully on the Mac.

Beyond desktop software, the AEC landscape has also shifted toward the cloud. Numerous leading solutions now operate largely through the browser, including common data environment and collaboration platforms from some of the industry’s biggest players, Autodesk among them. That evolution matters because it reduces the degree to which professional practice is tied to a single desktop operating system.

It is important to add this postscript because the feature above does not sufficiently credit the many AEC developers that have supported the Mac faithfully and well. To leave them unnamed risks flattening the story and overstating the role of what is missing. The larger point of the article remains unchanged: the Mac’s AEC story is still unfinished, especially when seen through the lens of Architosh’s origin story and the editorial and community ambitions that defined its first nine years. But unfinished does not mean unbuilt, and it certainly does not mean unsupported.

We hope companies such as Nemetschek, Trimble, McNeel, and others understand that editorial choice in context. This feature is only the first in a broader Apple at 50 series on Architosh. In the next installment, we speak with an architect who has done a great service to the Mac-based architecture community, especially in the years after Architosh broadened its editorial focus beyond exclusive Mac coverage. And there is more to come in the months ahead.

The post Apple at 50: The Mac’s Unfinished AEC Story appeared first on Architosh.

From Alphabet X Lab

Dandelion Energy, a startup incubated within Alphabet’s X Lab, is attempting to move geothermal from a niche architectural choice to a standardized industrial product. By targeting the top 25 production homebuilders in the United States, Dandelion is not just selling geothermal systems; it is re-engineering part of the business logic of production housing, offering housing customers superior cost of ownership and heating and cooling operational costs, while also delivering other tangible benefits.

To understand how this shift is occurring, Architosh spoke with Wyatt Roberts, Vice President of New Construction at Dandelion Energy. A building scientist and Certified Passive House Designer (CPHD), Roberts is the architect of Dandelion’s expansion into the high-volume market—most notably a massive 1,500-home partnership with Lennar in the Denver metro area.

The Risk Mitigation Barrier

For a titan like Lennar, the primary hurdle to innovation is rarely the technology itself—it is the disruption of a hyper-optimized, risk-averse workflow. “They are very motivated to not have problems,” Roberts notes. “Their risk mitigation is significant, and they are conservative in adopting new technologies.”

Dandelion’s geothermal partnership with Lennar homes in this picture of a development in Colorado.

In the production homebuilding world, a single localized failure in a new HVAC system can cascade into thousands of warranty claims across a national footprint. Consequently, Dandelion’s first challenge wasn’t just proving that the earth is a stable thermal battery; it was proving that they could supply the system at a scale that matched Lennar’s pace without introducing new liabilities.

“The first hurdle was small relative to the pricing hurdle,” explains Roberts. “They were happy to give it a try as long as it didn’t cost a penny more than traditional systems. And that became our next challenge.”

De-conglomerating the Supply Chain

The traditional AEC perception is that geothermal costs roughly three times as much as a gas-fired furnace. According to Roberts, this is often a byproduct of a fragmented, multi-layered supply chain. “In the high-end home market, the GC calls his preferred HVAC subs, who then call the drillers, and they put this conglomerate together… There are all these layers of markup, and it ends up costing 2.5x – 3x more than what is possible with a traditional system.”

Dandelion’s solution is a vertically integrated design-build operation. By controlling the engineering and drilling, they have driven hard costs down by nearly 40% compared to one-off installs by driving economies of scale in their supply chain and mobilization costs. However, they focus solely on the geothermal system itself and aren’t looking to replace the builder’s trusted partners with the entire HVAC system. Instead, they act as a turn-key distributor, offering certification and installation training for the HVAC subcontractors who already work with Lennar. This allows Dandelion Energy to maintain specification control of the geothermal system while keeping the labor force familiar and the delivery model scalable.

Cracking the Cost-Basis Code: The HERS Advantage

The true breakthrough in the “cost win” for builders lies in the nuances of energy modeling and the HERS (Home Energy Rating System). In markets like Colorado and Maryland, Dandelion has leveraged incentive landscapes to bridge the cost comparison gap entirely.

In Colorado, for instance, a $25,000 whole-home energy rebate requires homes to be Energy Star Next Gen and DOE Energy-Ready. “Only $5,000 is directly attributed to the geothermal,” Roberts reveals, “but because the geothermal efficiency is so high, it allowed [Lennar] to hit other HERS rating targets with less costly building components.”

By maximizing HERS points through a geothermal system that is vastly more efficient than fossil-based systems, builders can eliminate expensive components elsewhere—such as triple-paned glass or specialized wall insulation. In effect, the geothermal system becomes a strategic asset that reduces the total construction cost of the building envelope.

The Case for Single-Home Loops

One of the most debated topics in industrialized geothermal is the choice between centralized “district” systems and individual loops. While district systems offer a certain communal elegance, Dandelion has found that for production homes, the greater economy lies in single-home systems drilled directly under the footprint of the building.

Another view of the Lennar development with geothermal deployment at scale with Dandelion.

“This eliminates the extra pumping and other equipment costs of distributing the system around an entire neighborhood,” says Roberts. “A single loop per house is more cost-efficient… and the pumping power is much lower. You can just use the pumps in the heat pump.”

The efficiency of this model is further boosted by the mobilization scale. By drilling dozens of homes simultaneously, the expensive “heavy equipment mobilization” cost is amortized across the entire neighborhood. Depending on site geology, Dandelion typically utilizes either a single 600-foot bore or two 300-foot bores to tap into the earth’s constant temperature. In Colorado, where deep earth remains in the low 50s, the system leverages a tight thermal delta—sending water out at 30°F in winter and receiving it back at 42°F—to provide the base energy for the compressor with minimal electrical lift.

Site Planning and Lifecycle Value

Beyond the balance sheet, the move to geothermal solves a significant spatial problem for the AEC professional. On modern, high-density “tiny lots,” the removal of the outdoor condenser unit is a major victory for site planning and outdoor livability. Dandelion’s system uses a packaged heat pump with an integrated air-handler, moving the entire thermal process indoors.

The result is a quantitative win for the homeowner:

• Operating Costs: Roughly half that of traditional fossil fuel systems.
• Equipment Longevity: Because the heat pump is protected indoors, it boasts a 20-25 year lifecycle, compared to the weather-beaten 10-15 years of an outdoor unit.
• Infrastructure Permanence: The ground loop piping is warranted for 60 years, effectively becoming a permanent part of the home’s real estate value.

These are substantial quantitative wins for the homeowner, especially in the near-term value of monthly energy costs.

Societal Impact and the Grid

The broader implications are staggering. A recent U.S. Department of Energy study suggests that widespread geothermal deployment could result in $1 trillion in electricity grid savings. Because geothermal reduces summer peak demand by 3-4kW and winter peak by 3-6kW, it serves as a stabilizer for a grid increasingly strained by the “electrify everything” movement. Additionally, the AI infrastructure race worldwide is further straining electric grids, compounding the “electricfy everything” movement.

“My passion is with the production builders because it makes a societal impact at the scale we are working,” Roberts concludes. By aligning the financial incentives of the builder with the performance demands of the energy grid and the pocketbooks of the homeowner, Dandelion Energy is proving that the “green premium” is a relic of the past.

In the new AEC landscape, geothermal isn’t just a sustainable choice—it’s a competitive advantage.

The post Industrializing Geothermal: Dandelion at Scale appeared first on Architosh.

If you ask founder and CEO Paul O’Carroll what kind of product Arcol is, he doesn’t start with “feasibility,” “mass modeling,” or even “BIM.”

MORE: Arcol Makes Big Splash at AIA National Boston

“Arcol is not a feasibility tool,” he says. “I didn’t set out to create a feasibility tool for our industry. I wanted to rethink all of authoring in our industry, with the browser, with collaboration, and, increasingly more importantly, with AI at its core.”

Early design became Arcol’s starting point, not because it was the company’s focus, but because it is where the industry feels most pain. It is, O’Carroll says, “a mess,” a stage where most firms stitch together SketchUp, InDesign, Excel, and Miro to assemble presentations to owners. BIM tools were never built to handle this phase gracefully. Autodesk’s acquisition of Spacemaker, which evolved into Forma, is one acknowledgment of that gap.

Arcol aims to collapse that fragmentation into a single, fluid environment where concept modeling, layout, costing, and collaboration coexist from the moment a design idea is born. For architects using Arcol, early-phase modeling isn’t something done in isolation and exported later. It becomes the foundation for everything that follows.

Arcol’s long-term ambition is expansive, but its entry point is deliberately narrow: owning the earliest decisions in a project, before documentation, before detailing, before traditional BIM tools are at their strongest. And this is not just about the design team, but rather every player, from owners, architects, engineers, and the general contractor.

Rethinking the Design Phase—Not Just Dressing It Up

O’Carroll is very clear that Arcol’s entry point—early-stage design—is strategic, not limiting.

On one level, this is about going where incumbent BIM tools are weakest. Revit, he notes, is “a big, scary product” with enormous surface area and legacy. It dominates documentation and production, but it’s notoriously clumsy in the conceptual phase.

“The way we think about our product strategy,” he says, “is to effectively and discreetly attack the design stages.”

Today, that means owning the earliest phase—concept, options, and feasibility studies—as a fully cloud-based, real-time multi-user BIM environment.

A view of Arcol’s hybrid 2D and 3D user-interface interlaced with planning data that updates in real time to modeling and design configuration changes.

Owners respond positively to this transparency. Instead of seeing a frozen design snapshot, they see the thinking and the possibilities behind it. And because Arcol updates instantly as the model changes, cost implications, area take-offs, and diagrammatic relationships all move with it in real time. This ability to treat the early design phase as a true BIM space—data-driven, collaborative, and representational—sets the foundation for the platform’s broader ambitions.

Boards: Rethinking the Pin-Up Wall

One of Arcol’s most distinctive features is Boards, an infinite 2D canvas that blends model views, diagrams, images, annotations, and layout into one freeform presentation environment. O’Carroll says the idea came from watching firms adopt Miro and other whiteboarding tools to replace the studio pin-up wall. When the company wrote its early manifesto, it included the notion that architects needed a digital space that combined “Miro plus InDesign,” allowing creative composition rather than rigid sheet construction.

Boards are a critical feature in Arcol and marry aspects of Miro and Adobe InDesign. They are useful for multiple functions, from pin-up reviews, inspo boards, and team and client meetings, among other things. They are also part of its long-term strategic planning to take on documentation.

Boards function as both an ideation surface and a presentation environment. They allow designers to work the way they sketch and think—freely, visually, and without the constraints of margins or pagination. But Boards also reflect Arcol’s long-term view of documentation. O’Carroll notes that as AI automates more aspects of documentation, architects will still need a creative 2D space to arrange, communicate, and curate the story of a project. Boards are designed as that future-proof layer. They solve today’s layout needs while preparing for an era where documentation becomes more automated, and presentation becomes more emergent.

Rhino and the Quest for a Unified Authoring Tool

The early-phase space is important to Arcol, but O’Carroll’s long-term goal is to build a next-generation authoring tool that handles both experimental geometry and production documentation. He is blunt about the limitations of current workflows. Revit, he notes, is not just poor at advanced geometry—it is “not a good design tool in general.” Rhino, meanwhile, is beloved for its geometric power yet “not a building design tool” and not inherently BIM. It emerged from boat modeling and remains a freeform NURBS environment, not a structured architectural one.

Arcol has developed its own proprietary geometry engine purpose-built for AEC and the needs of architects. This gives Arcol control and development speed over rivals. At the same time, Arcol is developing a Rhino integration coming soon.

Arcol wants to merge the strengths of both worlds. When O’Carroll describes the future of authoring, he argues that “you should be able to do the crazy, curvy architecture and the documentation in the same tool.” This is why Arcol is investing so heavily in a geometry engine capable of “complex buildings”—twisting towers, leaning slabs, and curved envelopes that are not just shapes but data-bearing elements that support floor cuts, schedules, and quantities.

Arcol is not building a mesh modeler. It is building a BIM-first geometry engine that can handle complex, expressive forms in a structured way.

Deep Rhino Integration: A Bridge to the Future

For now, Arcol is aiming to pair that ambition with a deep Rhino integration designed to allow firms to keep using Rhino while gradually shifting BIM tasks into Arcol. This is more than a file importer. O’Carroll describes the goal as enabling designers to model in Rhino, send geometry directly to Arcol, cut floors and extract data, then push changes back to Rhino and have Arcol update automatically. He contrasts this with solutions like RhinoInside, which he says can feel clunky and incomplete.

Arcol’s approach positions Rhino as an advanced geometry companion rather than a separate design silo. Rhino handles the most complex shapes, and Arcol handles the BIM, the cuts, the data, the sheets, and eventually more advanced geometry itself. This bridge allows Arcol to focus on the design-development and documentation domains currently dominated by Revit. And because Arcol treats Rhino geometry as native, it dissolves the typical boundary between concept modeling and BIM authoring.

Rhino integration with Arcol further cements Rhino’s reputation as the dominant 3D modeler for advanced form-making in architecture while delivering the critical data layer and data analytics that power Arcol’s strengths in early design and test-fitting type workflows.

O’Carroll sees this as essential to Arcol’s long-term goal. When asked whether he means to displace Revit only in the design stages, he is direct: “In the future, with Arcol, you shouldn’t have to ever use Revit.” This is not a timid ambition. It is a strategic direction.

Forma and the Incumbent Cannibalization Trap

Autodesk’s Forma validates Arcol’s direction, but O’Carroll sees Forma’s challenge as one not of creativity but of cannibalization. Revit remains Autodesk’s core revenue anchor. Forma must innovate enough to compete with startups like Arcol, but not so much that it undermines the mothership. O’Carroll says this forces Autodesk to “walk a very slow, precise line” that startups do not have to respect.

He also believes that Forma has been following, not leading. He notes that Forma has repeatedly copied Arcol’s features, calling this “validation” of Arcol’s direction. And because Forma is bundled with Autodesk subscriptions, many customers have access to it for free but still choose Arcol for its speed, immediacy, and collaborative depth. The implication is that Forma cannot move as fast as it needs to, and its strategy is constrained by a business model built around per-seat licensing in an era barreling toward automation.

While Autodesk talks about fixing industry data to unlock AI, O’Carroll argues the deeper issue is that legacy BIM platforms were architected before LLMs or agentic workflows existed. Their challenge is to rewrite decades-old file structures; Arcol’s advantage is simply that it doesn’t have that burden.

AI Agents and the Future of Model-Centric Collaboration

One thing that Autodesk Forma does have is an expanding ecosystem of apps and connections to Forma. Yet, O’Carroll feels this is far less important than the core problems that remain unsolved. “Our strategy is on users’ problems, not building out an ecosystem,” he says.

One of the biggest core problems facing the industry has always been collaboration, and Arcol, from the beginning, has taken an approach that stemmed from Figma’s groundbreaking collaborative approach.

Arcol firmly believes that agentic AI will power Arcol along with human architects in the near future as just another type of “collaborator” in the design process.

“Figma was really the first company that did this. That company’s CEO is one of our early investors, and we have been really fortunate to hire a lot of Figma engineers, and this is an important part of the DNA of our company,” says O’Carroll.

Connected to that DNA about collaboration is the role AI may play. If Arcol’s collaborative engine comes from its Figma DNA, its AI strategy follows naturally from the idea that the model should host not just humans but agents. O’Carroll believes that within a few years, “there will be more AI agents in our industry than individuals,” he says, and that these agents “will behave not as separate tools but as collaborators” occupying the same design environment as architects, engineers, and builders.

In this future, a general contractor might provide not a human preconstruction service but a preconstruction agent that joins an Arcol file to run cost, risk, or schedule assessments. Because Arcol’s environment is real-time and multi-user, agents can coexist with human designers and provide feedback instantly. O’Carroll says this agentic future amplifies Arcol’s collaborative advantage: “Agents are just collaborators,” and Arcol aims to be the best collaborative workspace in the industry.

This philosophy drives Arcol’s insistence on a browser-native, multi-cursor system. Collaboration is not a feature—it is a foundation enabling a future where teams and agents share a single model space, responding to changes as they happen.

GCs and Owners: Rise of Preconstruction-Driven Design

Perhaps the most disruptive change Arcol is accelerating lies not in geometry but in cost. Across the US, large general contractors are moving upstream into design, using their vast Procore project histories to guide owners earlier and with more accuracy than ever before. Many are acquiring architecture firms or building in-house design teams.

Arcol sits at the center of this shift because its conceptual cost engine runs directly off the design model. As a team pushes and pulls geometry, Arcol updates quantities, assumptions, and cost implications instantly. And unlike traditional conceptual estimating, Arcol does not require detailed modeling of components. Instead, it uses user-defined rules—such as structure type or stud spacing—to “infer costs” from high-level geometry. Inferring will only take costs so far, but in the early stage, this level of information can be impactful.

Arcol’s early-stage building costing functions leverage “user-defined” rules to infer costs from high-level geometry rather than itemize every building element, since such data does not exist in early-phase architectural work. This enables architects to see cost impacts from various design options early.

This enables a form of real-time value engineering. O’Carroll describes GCs who load their historical Procore data into Arcol to compare a new design against dozens of similar past projects. The confidence this gives owners is transformative. They see cost implications unfold as the design evolves rather than weeks later during bidding.

Arcol is not trying to replace detailed estimating, but it wants to own the early conceptual cost space—the part of the design process where architects frequently struggle to keep budgets aligned with design ambition. O’Carroll acknowledges that architects often let cost control drift downstream, only to be surprised by budget overruns. He imagines a more collaborative approach where architects send GCs an Arcol link and work together live, clarifying where design intent and cost flexibility intersect.

In this scenario, Arcol becomes the shared language of early decision-making. Owners, architects, and builders see the same model, the same numbers, and the same assumptions. And because the model drives the cost, trust grows. This transparency marks a cultural shift from the old paradigm—design first, cost later—to a new one where cost and construction inform design from the outset.

Beyond Collaboration: A Shared Digital Room

Arcol’s real-time engine makes meetings less about screen-sharing and more about co-presence. O’Carroll notes that he doesn’t feel compelled to embed video chat into the tool because teams can simply open Arcol in parallel with a Zoom call. The important part is not the communication channel—it is the shared world the participants inhabit. The 3D model becomes the room where decisions are made, explored, iterated, and understood.

As more GCs bring design services in-house, and as more owners demand cost-aware early design, Arcol’s collaborative fabric becomes an industry equalizer. A designer in New York, a GC estimator in Phoenix, and an owner in Miami can all pull on the same model together. The geometry does not hide cost assumptions. The cost assumptions do not rule out geometry. And the entire early-phase process becomes more intelligible to all parties.

The BIM 2.0 Horizon

The coming Rhino integration remains one of Arcol’s most important strategic moves. Not only does it allow firms to continue using a beloved modeler, but it positions Arcol as the natural next-generation BIM environment for those Rhino workflows. By turning Rhino geometry into BIM-ready data without losing fidelity, Arcol effectively unifies two worlds that were historically forced apart. And by committing to its own complex geometry engine, Arcol signals its intention to eventually shrink the distance between conceptual modeling and BIM authoring to zero.

Revit, meanwhile, stands on the opposite side of this equation. It anchors production workflows but struggles to move upstream. Forma hints at Autodesk’s understanding that BIM must evolve, but it is bound by the need not to disrupt a massive incumbent revenue base. Arcol does not have that constraint. Its strategy is simple: innovate where incumbents cannot, connect worlds they cannot connect, and shift the center of BIM gravity into the browser.

Conclusion: A New Center of Gravity for Design

Arcol is far more than an early-stage generative modeler. And it is not just an extension for Rhino, or a rough estimator, or an AEC industry presentation layer. It is an attempt to rebuild architectural authoring around modern principles: real-time collaboration, browser delivery, agentic intelligence, integrated cost logic, and complex geometry conceived as data from the start.

The post A New Center of Gravity—Arcol is Rebuilding Architectural Authoring appeared first on Architosh.

In 2014, he founded Green Badger to solve the problem. The mission was straightforward but ambitious: automate the tedious, error-prone processes behind green construction compliance. Over the next decade, the company’s cloud platform became a widely adopted tool across architecture and construction, particularly for simplifying LEED documentation. But the tectonic shifts underway in global ESG reporting, corporate sustainability transparency, supply-chain responsibility, and embodied carbon accountability would soon push Green Badger—and the entire AEC sector—into a much broader landscape.

Late last Fall, Green Badger unveiled the most consequential update in its history: a rebuilt LEED platform designed for modern workflows and a brand-new Construction ESG platform capable of tracking “environmental, social, and governance” metrics across entire portfolios. With this launch, Linstroth is positioning Green Badger as an indispensable system of record for the next decade of AEC sustainability.

The Rise of ESG and Why AEC Needs New Tools

Although Green Badger built its early reputation on LEED documentation automation, the pressure on organizations to track sustainability performance now extends far beyond certification. ESG frameworks—once relegated to corporate sustainability offices—have reached deeply into the construction and real estate sectors. Owners ranging from technology giants like Apple to private developers and institutional clients are now expected to report on carbon, water, energy, waste, supply-chain equity, and workforce wellness with a degree of accuracy and transparency previously unimaginable.

Green Badger’s new ESG software, showing the dashboard on the left and sustainable materials info on the right screen.

Linstroth explained that roughly two years ago, Green Badger expanded its focus beyond LEED so firms could benchmark and report ESG-related outcomes irrespective of certification paths. Increasingly, design and construction teams are being asked to deliver data for corporate social responsibility reports, internal carbon budgets, materials pledges, and public environmental disclosures. AEC professionals, he says, “are now being asked for sustainable development and construction and the reporting and certifications that go along with leadership in ESG,” necessitating tools that can keep pace with an explosion of metrics and accountability requirements.

The new Construction ESG platform addresses this by enabling organizations to track and benchmark everything from embodied carbon to M/WBE participation, from water use to workforce indicators, all within a unified cloud environment. For large enterprises, this allows project-level data to roll up seamlessly into corporate reporting structures. For smaller firms or mission-aligned organizations, the platform offers a level of visibility and structure typically accessible only to large sustainability departments. Whether the user is a Fortune 500 company or a regional design practice, the need for transparent, validated sustainability data has become universal.

Architects Push for Early-Stage Tools—and Green Badger Responds

One of the more unexpected drivers of the new update came from the architectural side of the industry. Architects had long used Green Badger’s LEED product database reactively—typically after materials were specified or procured. But over the past several years, more firms began asking for better tools to use the database proactively, particularly for material research aligned with the AIA Materials Pledge or early-stage embodied carbon decision-making.

Linstroth said many architects expressed the same sentiment: if the platform allowed more flexibility, they would use it at the beginning of the design process, not just at the certification phase. That feedback shaped a major expansion of the new platform. Green Badger now includes a fully revamped product research environment built specifically for architects, allowing teams to evaluate embodied carbon levels, access EPDs and HPDs, compare material options, and assemble firm-wide brand standards.

Architects can now search tens of thousands of verified product entries and compare something as simple as two tile options for their embodied carbon impact. They can save preferred products for reuse, organize materials into firm standards, and ensure that early design moves align with sustainability commitments. According to Linstroth, these workflows can save firms “hundreds of hours” by consolidating material data that previously lived in disorganized spreadsheets or scattered repositories.

This shift reflects a larger industry trend: embodied carbon decision-making is moving upstream. Tools that once served compliance roles are now becoming foundational research companions at the design table.

A Vast and Verified Materials Database

Central to Green Badger’s platform is its vast materials database, which has evolved substantially over the years. Originally populated through internal curation and crowdsourced user input (with validation), it has now expanded through direct relationships with manufacturers, certification agencies, and major industry data sources.

With this update, Green Badger integrates directly with the two largest environmental product data ecosystems in the world:

• Building Transparency (EC3) for carbon data and tens of thousands of EPDs
• HPD Collaborative for health product declarations

This allows users to access environmental and health documentation directly from within Green Badger, complete with associated files such as EPDs, HPDs, VOC certifications, and CDPH documentation. The platform aggregates these sources, along with additional materials data, giving architects and contractors a centralized, verified repository rather than relying on scattered links or file-hunting.

Manufacturers cannot upload data directly—submissions must go through Green Badger’s internal validation process. This ensures the system maintains data integrity, an essential requirement if sustainability reporting is to mature from aspirational messaging into auditable evidence.

Dashboards Designed for Immediate Insight

A major visual change in the new release is the introduction of redesigned dashboard interfaces built on a modern tech stack. These dashboards use intuitive radial gauges—similar to automotive speedometers—to help teams understand progress instantly: LEED credit achievement, embodied carbon reductions, waste diversion, water and energy benchmarks, and M/WBE participation all surface visually and in real time.

Another view of the new Green Badger software and its new user interface, all built on a modern web browser tech stack.

For many firms, this replaces workflows traditionally run through spreadsheets—systems that often obscure progress until it’s too late to course-correct. The new dashboards can be tailored to firm or project goals, offering a personalized cockpit that aligns with sustainability targets.

Teams can view projects by stage, certification path, or performance status. They can compare similar projects or zoom out to see patterns across entire portfolios. For owners managing multiple developments or architecture firms juggling dozens of concurrent efforts, the ability to glance at a dashboard and quickly diagnose performance is a marked improvement over reactive end-of-project reporting.

Rebuilding LEED Tracking for a Modern Era

While the ESG platform is the headline, the renewed LEED documentation tool is also a significant milestone. Originally developed during the LEED 2009 era, the previous software had reached the natural limits of its architecture. Instead of layering updates onto aging code, Green Badger rebuilt the LEED environment from scratch on top of its ESG foundation.

The result is a LEED tracking system ready for LEED v5 reporting. It supports cross-certification tracking beyond LEED itself, enables real-time collaboration across owners, GCs, subs, and consultants, and automates the generation of LEED submission packages, including ZIP archives of backup documents and auto-filled LEED worksheets.

Field reporting has also been enhanced on mobile iOS and Android apps, enabling site teams to complete IAQ inspections, erosion control reporting, and other required documentation directly on the jobsite. The platform maintains a time and user-stamped record for accountability, centralizing all documents within the project space.

Users report finding the vast majority of their materials inside Green Badger’s database, making the gathering of certification documentation far less arduous. Where custom or project-specific materials arise—such as custom millwork—teams can upload and track them manually with the same consistency.

A Centralized Future for AEC Sustainability Data

Green Badger’s latest platform is as much a reflection of industry evolution as it is a technical achievement. The building sector is transitioning into a phase where sustainability documentation is no longer isolated or optional. Firms are being called upon to prove environmental performance, demonstrate supply-chain responsibility, and deliver verifiable data across dozens of metrics.

Spreadsheets cannot scale to meet that challenge. What the industry now requires are centralized systems that validate, organize, and standardize sustainability information across disciplines, firms, and project lifecycles.

The new Green Badger is the industry’s preferred tool for ESG and LEED compliance management, and now with a very large and growing material research database that provides architects with the environmental and sustainable data they need to make material selections for their projects.

Green Badger appears to be aiming at exactly that role—a sustainability data backbone for AEC.

The platform’s combined ESG and LEED capabilities, architectural research tools, firm-wide standards workflows, integration with global environmental databases, and collaborative project environment all point to a future where sustainable construction data is continuous, transparent, and fully traceable.

The company’s decision to rebuild its tech stack signals confidence in where this market is heading. As Linstroth put it, “this platform is built on an ESG foundation and starts from the beginning—a ground-up reinvention shaped by new expectations, new regulations, and a rapidly maturing sustainability culture across the built environment.”

With embodied carbon commitments accelerating, LEED v5 in place, AIA materials pledges gaining traction, and owners demanding clearer sustainability reporting, this is a timely and meaningful advancement for AEC professionals.

The post Green Badger’s New Leap: Rewiring Sustainability Data for the AEC appeared first on Architosh.

‘End of an Era: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future’ was first published on 18 December 2025 inside our Xpresso-4X newsletter. To gain early access to some of our best content, subscribe to Xpresso-4X now. It’s free! 

FOR YEARS, THE AEC INDUSTRY HAS FRAMED THE FUTURE OF BIM as a software problem. Faster tools. Smarter automation. Better collaboration. But beneath every roadmap, every keynote, and every feature release lies a deeper force shaping what is—and isn’t—possible.

That force is silicon.

The next phase of BIM—and AEC software technologies as a whole—will not be decided by interface changes or subscription and software delivery models alone. It will be decided by the physics of modern semiconductors and the architectural assumptions embedded in the tools that architects and designers rely on every day.

The Assumptions CAD and BIM Were Built On

In our last major special feature on the CAD industry and semiconductors (see: Architosh, “Chip Technology, Geopolitics, and the CAD Industry,” 21 Jan 2022), we laid out some of the emerging changes shaping the semiconductor space, especially the rise of ARM processors. This time, we go deeper into the facts, trends, and stories shaping that change and the impacts on the CAD and BIM industry.

For more than two decades, professional design software has evolved within a remarkably stable computing environment. Revit ran on Windows. Windows ran on Intel x86 processors. And each new generation of CPUs delivered higher clock speeds and better single-thread performance.

Those assumptions shaped everything from geometry kernels and solvers to regeneration logic and viewport behavior. Performance gains arrived reliably, year after year, with little need to rethink fundamental software architecture.^{1 2 3} 

That era has ended.

The inflection point arrived quietly between 2015 and 2019, when Intel’s long-promised 10nm manufacturing process failed to arrive on schedule. What appeared at first to be a temporary execution problem was, in fact, the first visible sign of a structural shift in how computing performance would scale going forward.⁴

When x86 Met Physics (High-Frequency Era)

Intel’s 10nm struggle wasn’t just about delays. It was a collision between decades-old architectural assumptions and the physical limits of advanced semiconductor manufacturing.⁵

To understand what happened at Intel—and why BIM is now entering a new computing era—we need to briefly visit the transistor level. (see image below or click here for a fun basic physical model explanation, or here for a complete visual history of Intel’s transistors, or here for a far more detailed and illustrated history of the transistor over time. All of those links are videos.)

SIDEBAR — How a Transistor Works. A transistor consists of a channel for electrical current, a source and drain on either end, and a gate that controls whether current flows through the channel (under the gate). A voltage at the gate creates an electric field that opens or closes the channel (in grey color above), switching digital “0’s” or “1’s”. Billions of these switches (transistors) toggle on and off billions of times per second, in modern semiconductors. To understand this more completely, watch any of the three video references listed above this graphic.

For 40 years, Intel mastered the art of shrinking these switches. Moore’s Law wasn’t just a prediction — it was Intel’s operational rhythm. Each new node promised more transistors, higher frequency, and therefore higher performance. ^{4 6 7}

x86 especially thrived in this model. Its architectural assumptions were tied to:

• very deep pipelines (15-20+ stages)
• high clock frequencies (4.0 – 6 GHz turbo boosts)
• complex variable-length instruction decoding
• massive out-of-order execution windows
• significant speculative-execution chip design

In the High-Frequency Era, this design delivered extraordinary single-thread performance—the exact metric for which tools like Revit were optimized.^{2 3}  In fact, most CAD and BIM users likely don’t know that CAD tools and 3D geometry engines, by their logical nature, aren’t viable candidates for multi-threaded coding and therefore multi-core chip acceleration. Instead, their speed depends mostly on super-fast single-core performance, and users would leverage faster workstations and computers by acquiring x86 CPUs with faster frequencies (measured in GHz).^{2 3 4}

However, by the mid-2010s, several forces converged at advanced nodes. At smaller nodes, transistors face hard constraints: reduced voltage headroom, increased leakage, higher wire resistance, and tighter timing margins. Intel’s x86 designs—optimized for deep pipelines and very high clock speeds—depend on stable voltage and precise timing across complex execution paths.^{5 8 9 10 13} 

SIDEBAR — How a Transistor Works: By the time Intel ran into problems at 10nm, the semiconductor industry had long moved to FinFET transistors. Instead of lying flat, the channel was rotated 90 degrees. This enabled the gate to wrap around the channel on three sides, thereby providing greater control over the source-to-drain current. These vertical channels offered another benefit: more of them could be stuffed into the shrinking real estate of microprocessors. But importantly, the metal interconnects for power and signal in chips are now getting impossibly close to each other and creating numerous electrical issues.

At 10nm, those requirements became increasingly difficult to satisfy. Metal interconnects grew so small that resistance rose sharply. Multi-patterned lithography introduced variability and yield problems. Timing closure became a challenge not just for experimental designs, but for mainstream high-frequency CPUs.⁹

For the first time in history, Intel’s new node produced chips that ran slower at dramatically lower frequencies and with poor performance compared to 10nm goals.

The company’s decision to fabricate these impossibly fine features using complex multi-patterned DUV lithography (rather than the emerging EUV) led to staggering defect rates and yield issues. It wasn’t that Intel forgot how to manufacture chips — it was that x86’s architectural demands ran headlong into fundamental semiconductor manufacturing physical limits.^{11 12} 

This was the moment the industry should have realized: the performance ladder Revit and other professional software had been climbing for two decades was breaking down. And the implications went far beyond Intel’s roadmap and the CAD and BIM software industry.

They signaled the end of the High-Frequency Era that professional software had grown accustomed to.

The Voltage-Limited Era Arrives

As transistor scaling continued, the industry crossed an invisible threshold. Voltage—rather than frequency—became the dominant limiting factor. Power density, heat dissipation, and energy efficiency emerged as first-order constraints.^{14 15 16} 

While Intel struggled, a different architecture— ARM—was quietly scaling in a direction better aligned with modern transistor physics.

A picture of the Amazon Graviton4 CPU. (Image: Amazon). Amazon has aggressively deployed its ARM-based Graviton series processors over x86 due to the lowered total cost of ownership. From the beginning, they offered substantially superior power performance per watt.

ARM was designed from the beginning for low-voltage, fixed-length instructions and high IPC (instructions per cycle). It never needed 5 GHz turbo modes or 20-stage pipelines. Its efficiency model was a better match for the emerging transistor world, one where performance per watt would displace the metric of just pure performance.

ARM thrives on:

• shallow pipelines
• simpler decode paths
• wide, power-efficient execution
• low-voltage operation
• excellent thermal behavior
• massive parallelism

As nodes shrink toward—and below—2nm, voltage becomes the hard limit. Frequency is no longer the performance driver. Performance per watt is the new dominant metric.^{15 16}

What once made ARM ideal for mobile devices now makes it well-suited to modern semiconductor nodes. The Voltage-Limited Era.

Apple Silicon Changed the Conversation

When Apple introduced the M1 in 2020, it did more than launch a new processor family. It demonstrated that ARM-based CPUs could outperform x86 designs in both performance and efficiency within mainstream professional workloads.²⁰

Apple’s success was often attributed to vertical integration or unified memory. Those factors mattered—but the deeper reason was architectural alignment with modern silicon physics.

Apple’s M1 “Apple Silicon” changed the entire trajectory of the PC industry when it was introduced in the fall of 2020, demonstrating breathtaking performance-per-watt advantages over both Intel and AMD. Analysts said at the time Apple deployed unique SoC advantages like its unified memory architecture, and thus downplayed the benefits of the ARM architecture itself. Qualcomm would later introduce equally stunning new Snapdragon X Elite chips without many of the same advantages Apple Silicon had. (see below).

Apple’s cores achieved high single-thread performance at relatively modest clock speeds, proving that the performance model long associated with x86 was no longer the only path forward.

In a world where voltage limits mattered, Apple’s architectural strategy was better aligned with the physics of semiconductor manufacturing ^{18 19 20} 

Qualcomm Proved It Wasn’t Just Apple

Without Apple’s vertical integration or unified memory advantage, Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite still matched or beat Intel and AMD on:

• IPC
• sustained performance
• power efficiency
• bursty (CAD/BIM) productivity workloads

The Hyperscalers Follow the Physics

Intel’s Countermove: 18A and Backside Power Delivery

In RibbonFET, the “fins” of FinFET process technology are laid on their sides and then spaced vertically. They thus look like “ribbons” in the image above (Intel). The transistor “gate” is the silver block that the ribbons (silicon channels) pass through. Voltage applied to the gate either allows or prevents current from passing through the channel, resulting in a “0” or “1” at the transistor.

These are very meaningful advances. They will help Intel remain competitive. And both Intel and AMD have long ago altered their chip architectures to capitalize on the efficiencies of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) based chip design. Today’s modern x86 processors are actually a hybrid of CISC (Common Instruction Set Computing) and an ARM-like RISC design, with the remaining but unavoidable legacy baggage of x86 variable-length instructions and CISC-to-RISC conversion layers.²⁹

Despite all this engineering and the backside power delivery (BSPDN) and gate-all-around transistors (GAA-FinFET), the underlying physics that limit x86’s deep pipelines and demand for high frequencies don’t go away. The architectural characteristics that favor ARM—low voltage operation, efficient execution, and heterogeneous integration—remain better aligned with the long-term direction of semiconductor physics.

PowerVia is Intel’s tradename for backside power delivery. (Image: Intel). This is a 3D section through a chip, which is made up of many layers. 18A innovates by separating power and signal wiring layers, thereby improving voltage stability and resolving numerous power- and current-related issues.

Intel may jump ahead at the “leading edge” chip manufacturing node. Intel will no doubt remain competitive over the next few years. It may even lead again in specific segments. But the long arc of semiconductor physics now bends away from x86.^{27 28 30}

And Intel knows this.

AMD and Intel are rumored to have secret ARM chip designs in the works—plans they will never make public until they truly see themselves as having no choice but to stay competitive with ARM-based chips.³¹

Intel even has a fast-growing partnership with SoftBank, with the Japanese firm owning 2% of Intel. Why would ARM’s majority owner partner with its leading x86 chip rival?³²

What This Means for BIM and CAD

An industry shift from x86 to ARM is already underway, thanks to Microsoft’s robust push in that direction.³⁴  But the process is a decade-long affair. The implications for legacy software stacks are massive. And no category is more exposed to this challenge than CAD and BIM.

Revit, Rhino, SolidWorks, and Maya were built during the peak of x86’s High-Frequency Era. Their engines, geometry kernels, solvers, and memory patterns all assume:

• a single-thread performance ceiling that keeps rising
• desktop tower thermals
• CPU-centric computation
• a predictable increase in clock speed

However, all of those assumptions are collapsing if not already collapsed.

Performance gains now come from parallelism, memory bandwidth, accelerators, and heterogeneous compute—not just from higher GHz. Software that depends heavily on single-thread CPU performance faces diminishing returns on legacy platforms.

At the same time, the market is already shifting:

• Core geometry kernels now support ARM natively.³⁵
• BIM and CAD applications ship ARM-optimized versions for macOS and, soon, Windows on ARM.
• Designers increasingly work on ARM-based laptops, tablets, and cloud workstations.
• AI-driven workflows rely on GPUs and NPUs as much as CPUs.

The shift is no longer hypothetical. It is underway. To be sure, many of the biggest x86-based CAD and BIM apps are severely tied down to legacy code and dependencies. But competitors move quickly. And since the computing paradigm shift from the desktop era to the mobile-cloud-first era, the BIM industry, in particular, is facing the rise of well-funded BIM 2.0 startups attacking long-standing pain points.

The question is no longer whether BIM will move to ARM, but when exactly and who will be left behind when it does.

Heterogeneous Compute: GPU Geometry, AI Inference, Hybrid Evaluation

When it comes to the hybrid future of compute, ARM has led the industry since it was created specifically for power efficiency and embedded systems, where heterogeneity has long been the norm.³⁶

Additionally, since Dennard scaling ran out of runway—the scaling law that was crucial to the single-core performance of the x86 architecture—parallelization and multi-threading were seen as critical to future semiconductor performance gains.^{37 38 39}

The future of BIM will rely much less on single-core CPU-centric execution and much more on heterogeneous compute, where CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and dedicated accelerators each handle different parts of the workload.^{40 41}

Future BIM systems will depend on:

• GPU-based generative AI modeling
• AI-assisted constraint solving
• AI-driven modeling assistance
• GPU and NPU shape inference
• hybrid CPU-GPU-AI simulation/model evaluation
• GPU or NPU-driven AI training on proprietary data
• mixed CPU/GPU/NPU pipelines
• massive memory bandwidth
• low-latency parallel workloads

These compute examples encompass much of what was shown to attendees at Autodesk University 2025 this past fall, with the introduction of Autodesk’s Neural CAD engines. ⁴¹

Even leading geometry engines are investigating GPU acceleration, but less on the core geometric modeling kernel and more on simulation (CFD on GPU), visualization, and AI. But the big game changers are generative AI and inference modeling workflows for the BIM (AEC) market.

MORE: AU25: All About Autodesk’s AI Neural CAD Engines

In the architectural industry, new AI software technologies will leverage the features of heterogeneous chip architectures—especially those with larger on-chip fast memory (like Apple’s unified memory or AMD’s recent AMD processors with enough onboard memory to load smaller LLMs for proprietary firm data.

Image of Autodesk’s geometry-oriented AI foundation model, or Neural CAD Engine, where AI inference can generatively shape 3D model data. (Architosh)

While traditional geometric kernels (think Spatial or Parasolid) struggle to parallelize modeling operations, AI “model inference” can generate, test, predict, and evaluate options in parallel, working with both open data and proprietary firm data stored “on-chip” or in the cloud. At the same time, heterogeneous chips can do “on-device” AI training on large sets of firm data (previous building designs and their metadata).

All of this shifts future BIM workflows from entirely CPU-bound (sans rendering and viewport generation) to a heterogeneous mix of GPU and NPU AI compute streams, addressing matters like:

• spatial “test-fit” model generation
• “KPI-driven” iteration
• clash detection, object clearance evaluation checks
• building, energy code compliance checks/optimization
• building energy and carbon analysis checks/optimization
• building simulations/optimization

This will change not just standard architectural workflows, but the physics of how BIM performance scales at the silicon level. Massive building and infrastructure projects may not scale onto “on-chip” memory and may need transport between on-chip memory and system storage memory. At AU25, the folks at a leading workstation maker emphasized this point in discussing AMD’s latest AI chip, which is fundamentally far more heterogeneous than past designs.

Image of Autodesk’s AI foundation model, or Neural CAD Engine, powering a version of Autodesk Forma where AI inference can generatively shape and test-fit 3D building model data. (Architosh). Additionally, AI software could “train” on existing BIM model data of a more proprietary nature, in which case, sensitive company IP may prefer that data to sit in on-chip memory and be handled by on-device or on-prem AI compute rather than through public cloud compute.

The important fact about the rise of heterogeneous compute is this. In the future of BIM, the CPU is no longer the only star. It is part of an ensemble cast.

The Future of BIM: The Silicon Will Decide

The future of BIM will not be shaped by nostalgia or incumbency. It will be determined by which computing platforms scale best within the constraints of modern silicon.

The High-Frequency Era is over. The Voltage-Limited Era has arrived.

In this new environment, Intel’s x86 architecture has lost its automatic advantage. Hyperscalers have moved past it, prioritizing performance per watt over raw clock speed. Even Microsoft—the other half of the Wintel duopoly—has embraced ARM, developing its own ARM-based datacenter processors and aggressively advancing Windows on ARM through its partnership with Qualcomm following its acquisition of Nuvia.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite made clear that ARM’s advantages are not confined to the cloud. Its Oryon cores deliver exceptional IPC and industry-leading performance per watt, validating ARM’s relevance across both datacenter and client computing.

Legendary chip architect Jim Keller has noted that, at the instruction-set level, ARM’s efficiency advantage over x86 may be as little as 5%.⁴² That assessment matters. It suggests x86’s inherent disadvantages in the new voltage-limited era are often overstated. Moreover, x86 chip makers (Intel and AMD have been rapidly moving in the ARM-like direction to address heterogeneous computing and today’s emphasis on performance per watt. AMD’s new Ryzen AI Max Pro series chips emulate Apple’s M-series SoCs by integrating CPU, GPU, and NPU cores on a single die, with a unified memory architecture that allows all cores to access a single, large pool of system memory. (see: YahooTech, “AMD’s New Ryzen AI Max CPUs are Built for MacBook Pro Competitors,” 6 Jan 2025).

x86 is not fundamentally broken—and Intel and AMD’s engineering prowess should never be dismissed. But momentum matters. And the momentum continues toward ARM, not away from it. As further evidence, we can note SoftBank’s acquisition of Ampere Computing this year for USD 6.5 billion. Ampere makes ARM chips for the datacenter and counts Oracle as a major client. Both SoftBank and Oracle are key players in the USD 500 billion AI datacenter project known as Stargate.

x86’s dominance in the datacenter hasn’t disappeared entirely; just the assumptions that led to it.

In a similar way, the assumptions that led to x86 dominance in PCs have largely disappeared or changed. The challenging part is always the software ecosystems that need conversion. And this is where x86 holds a major advantage over ARM: software compatibility requires a commitment. At first, the progress is slow, but it builds quietly and then quickly.

Going forward, the physics point decisively in ARM’s direction.

For BIM and CAD industries built on x86-era assumptions, the mandate is clear:

Adapt—or risk being disrupted.

End Notes

For those who are interested in diving deeper into this article’s facts, claims, and arguments, we have over 42 annotated footnotes for this article, representing weeks’ worth of research and reading. These notes are available as a companion special feature on Architosh titled: “INSIDER Only: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future — Footnotes.”

The article is exclusively available to our many Architosh INSIDER Member subscribers.

The post End of an Era: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future appeared first on Architosh.

‘End of an Era: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future’ will run on Architosh on 24 December 2025. The feature first ran in our Xpresso-4X newsletter published today (18 December). To gain early access to some of our best content, subscribe to Xpresso-4X now. It’s free! 

THIS COMPANION FEATURE is exclusively for INSIDER subscribers only and covers our extensive research and notes behind the Special Feature, “End of an Era: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future,” published in our Xpresso-4X newsletter today.

Extensive Research

The research for this newest feature was the most in-depth and extensive writing process in the publication’s history. Moreover, we intend to do more extensively researched features like this in the future. While the above feature includes a few link-outs, this article lists over 40 sources and includes extensive notes from academic and technical resources behind paywalls.

Sources are also further annotated in some cases, and this article includes images not found in the main feature.

Annotated Citations

The article’s main sections organize the following citations (link-outs). Readers are free to write in to the editor at anthony {at} architosh {dot} com for personal questions or comments.

The Assumptions CAD and BIM Were Built On

CAD and BIM applications from the beginning are inherently sequential in their core CAD operations (functions). Therefore, they have historically been difficult to parallelize across multiple cores, and most of the industry’s heavyweights were founded before multicore CPUs existed. Generally speaking, a CAD user experiences the speed of a CAD application when moving drawings or models around to work on a single area. Hence, drawing, regeneration, panning, and zooming have historically been sequential and single-threaded.

Another factor in 3D geometric models is constraint solving. When you move a component in a complex assembly, the software must recalculate all the physical and geometric relationships and constraints in sequence to ensure the model remains coherent.

Because the majority of user-facing interactive tasks in CAD and BIM programs has been traditionally bottlenecked by a single sequence of instructions, the most valuable performance metric for a CAD workstation has been the speed at which a single CPU core could execute work. This is measured in IPC (instructions per clock) multiplied by the chip’s clock frequency.

(1) Processors for CAD Hardware: Find the Balance Between Multiple Cores and Increased Single-Thread Performance  — (Cadalyst)

(2) Understanding CPU Cores vs Clock Speed for CAD: What Really Matters for Performance — Landmark Computers

Additional articles that discuss the CAD industry and how chips relate to the code behind BIM and CAD include “Matching workstations to real-world workflows” by AEC Magazine and “Intel Core vs AMD Ryzen for CAD, BIM & beyond” by AEC Magazine’s Greg Corke.

(3) BOXX Solutions Guide for Revit Workstations — BOXX Computers 

(4) The Shifting Semiconductor Landscape: Intel Arm, AES, Apple, Microsoft, Qualcomm, MediaTek, NVIDIA, AMD, and Beyond. –  Medium

When x86 Met Physics (High-Frequency Era)

While much of Intel’s 10nm node manufacturing problems have been blamed on the company’s decision to remain with DUV lithography versus adopting the then-emerging EUV lithography equipment from ASML, the fundamental issue is still one of colliding with physics.

By pushing for transistor density at aggressive levels, the wiring inside Intel’s 10nm chips had such tight pitches (the gap between wires) that increased wire resistance emerged, complicating timing and increasing sensitivity to process variability. Both of those are concrete manifestations of the physical limits mentioned in the core article. (see 8 – 9 below).

The solution to Intel’s 10nm debacle was to lower headroom voltage and frequencies. Cannon Lake and Ice Lake families were notably lower than even older 14nm parts, despite healthy IPC gains on Ice Lake. Cannon Lake ran at 2.2 GHz base with 3.2 GHz turbo cores, while Skylake through Coffee Lake (14nm mature nodes) shipped at base clocks around 3.6 – 4.0 GHz. Intel’s 10nm chips could not sustain the same frequencies as the previous generation.

(5) Intel’s 10nm Is Broken, Delayed Until 2019  – Tom’s Hardware 

This article talks about how Intel bit off a little too much by increasing density 2.7X over the 14nm node, where in the step up to 14nm, Intel increased density by 2.4x.

(6) Mapping Intel’s Tick Tock Clock Onto Xeon Processors — New Platform

This is a great article because it notes that when Dennard scaling (see next citation) ran out of gas (I think at 90nm node), Intel, AMD, IBM, and other chip makers needed to increase parallelism rather than ever-faster clock speeds to eke out performance gains. When Dennard scaling ended, Intel shifted to the famous Tick Tock philosophy. A tick was a shrink to a new (smaller) manufacturing process, and the Tock was a shift to a new chip architecture with expected marginal improvements in IPC (instructions per clock).

It’s critical to note that Tick-Tock finally broke down for Intel at 14nm. Intel originally planned to use the 10nm node for a three-stage process. It is called “Process (Tick)-Architecture (Tock)-Optimization.” Now, even rivals like TSMC span a chip node across four or more generations of improvements (e.g., TSMC’s 5nm family, from N5, N5P, N4, N4P, N4X). This allows a chip manufacturer to tune performance gains via adjustments to density, architecture, power, and tuned PDKs (Process Design Kits).

(7) Dennard Scaling – Wikipedia Entry

This article discusses the physics of Dennard Scaling. A bit technical for the average reader, you can use Google Gemini or another AI chatbot to explain it in simpler or alternative terms. Moore’s law itself—which states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years—is here at Wikipedia.

The next set of citations reviews the more specific physics challenges Intel encountered at 10nm, focusing on gate, metal, and fin pitches, as well as problems with the metal interconnect layers and timing closure. These issues are highly related to the argument that at 10nm, Intel collided with physics. In the end, Intel had to lower the frequencies of its 10nm chips to get acceptable yields. To understand this, “pitch” in semiconductor language refers to the distances between features in a chip.

Metal pitch refers to the minimum center-to-center distance between adjacent parallel metal interconnect lines on a chip. The metal layers form the “wiring” that connects all the transistors and components of the chip. Gate pitch is the minimum center-to-center distance between adjacent transistor gates. 

Intel’s 10nm process targeted a very aggressive minimal metal pitch of just 36nm. In comparison, TSMC’s 7nm node had a less aggressive pitch of around 40nm. 

(8) Intel’s 10nm Node: Past, Present, and Future — EE Times

This is a comprehensive 2020 review looking back at Intel’s 10nm node nightmare, and it is also important because the article describes how Intel shifted from copper to cobalt for the lowest metal interconnect layers to address the higher resistance expected from the tighter metal pitch.

“The shrinking geometries, in turn, place elevated demands on the metallization process and typical yield-related fail modes include incomplete gap-fill or voiding,” said Nicolas Breil, director of technical projects at Applied Materials, in an IEDM presentation two years ago. 

This partial use of cobalt is described in Intel’s IEDM 2017 10nm paper, which states that cobalt was introduced to improve electromigration and resistance.

(9) Timing Closure Issues Resurface — Semiconductor Engineering 

This article discusses how timing closure had resurfaced as a major challenge at 10nm and 7nm due to features and power modes, increased process variation, and other manufacturing error issues.

(10) Cobalt Could Untangle Chip’s Wiring Problems — IEEE Spectrum

This article’s opening sentence captures perfectly how Intel and other chip makers are colliding with the laws of physics.

“Today’s computer chips contain tens of kilometers of copper wiring, built up in 15 or so layers. As the semiconductor industry has shrunk the size of transistors, it has also had to make these interconnects thinner.” 

And here is another pivotal quote that supports the case that Intel collided with physics:

“The problem they’re trying to solve stems from basic physics: The narrower a wire (and the longer it is), the higher its electrical resistance. “Scaling is always bad for wires,” says Daniel Edelstein, a research fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. One of the chief architects of the technology that allowed IBM to switch from aluminum to copper in 1997, Edelstein knows his interconnects.”

The next set of citations reviews the more specific physics challenges Intel encountered at 10nm, without necessarily addressing Intel in each case. DUV multi-patterning challenges, DUV versus EUV, and the important wiring shrink issues are covered. 

(11) EUV vs DUV Native Defect Levels: Baseline Comparison  — Eureka

This article describes the “process variability” inherent to lithography processes, comparing Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) and Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography technologies. Intel took DUV to an extreme level, with 4-6 lithography passes (complex, multi-layered patterning) to achieve the tiny 3D features of its chip design. But one naturally occurring defect native to the lithography process is tool precision. For example, lens aberrations can lead to incorrect feature creation.

This article at Wikipedia also covers process defects from EUV stochastic issues to mask defects to lens variation issues.

(12) EUV’s Future Looks Even Brighter — Semiconductor Engineering

This article discusses how EUV improves pattern fidelity and reduces some overlay and line‑edge variability versus multi‑patterned DUV, but also emphasizes ongoing challenges with resist stochastic defects, mask contamination, and dose/process‑window tightness at leading nodes

(13) How To Reduce Timing Closure Headaches  – Semiconductor Engineering

The Voltage-Limited Era Arrives

(14) The Incredible Shrinking Transistor — Bits and Bytes (Substack)

This article is a historical overview of the history of shrinking the transistor. An important note about this article is that it clarifies that at every 10X increase in transistor count, a new class of computer are built upon that technology. This scaling law, related to Moore’s Law, has held true from Mainframes to Minicomputers to Microcomputers to Workstations, Desktops, Laptops, Smartphones, to Datacenters, to AI computers.

(15) ARM vs x86: The Future of competing computing architecture — Versus

A good overview article written in an easy-to-understand and friendly tone. Its accuracy is pretty solid, but its characterization of x86 as the performance king is misleading, especially since the Apple M1 has held the single-core performance crown for several years, with one brief moment now where they didn’t.

(16) Intel: Confronting Shifts and ARM’s Dominance — Seeking Alpha

This article is actually the second in a series, with the first article discussing Intel’s upcoming products and strategy moving forward. A key takeaway from this article is in the title and in the fact that market analysts acknowledge ARM’s dominance in key sectors of the chip industry (mobile PCs, the hyperscalers, and certain data center segments).

(17) The Tectonic Shift: Why ARM Is Reshaping Computing — Medium

This is a very good article that makes note from the beginning that ARM is proving it can beat x86 in both power and efficiency. That doesn’t mean performance per watt—that’s what “efficiency” means. Both Apple and Qualcomm have shown that ARM can win at power (performance) over x86 as well. Another key mention (and metric) mentioned in this article that speaks to both consumer PCs and datacenters is cost:

“While power efficiency is often the headline, cost is an equally important factor. Apple’s M-series chips aren’t just fast — they make MacBooks more efficient, giving Apple better margins while improving user experience. AWS’s Graviton ARM servers allow companies to cut cloud costs, making x86 instances look overpriced. Qualcomm and Microsoft are pushing ARM into Windows laptops, promising better battery life at lower prices.”

The article does make a crucial mistake, especially as related to the CAD and BIM industry, with its single-threaded software prevalence, noting that x86 still dominates performance. That is simply factually not true. Another key note in this piece is the mention of AMD’s earlier ARM plans.

“AMD’s current ARM push isn’t their first rodeo. Back in 2014–2016, the company had ambitious plans for ARM integration that were arguably ahead of their time. The K12 project promised custom ARM cores that could deliver x86-level performance, while Project Skybridge aimed to create pin-compatible x86 and ARM SoCs that manufacturers could swap interchangeably.” 

Another great note in this article is the comment that market dynamics are forcing an interesting stand-off for Intel and AMD:

“Both companies have spent decades building their x86 empires, but ARM’s accelerating momentum has forced them into an uncomfortable position: choose between preserving market share or preserving architecture loyalty.”

This is critical because nothing is preventing AMD and Intel from designing their own ARM chips. Finally, it’s worth quoting this article’s final thoughts:

“The ARM vs. x86 battle isn’t just a technical rivalry — it’s a fundamental industry shift driven by efficiency, cost, and the changing needs of modern computing.

Intel and AMD built an empire that lasted decades. But the world has changed, and the question now isn’t whether ARM can compete — it’s whether x86 can survive the new reality. The acceleration of this shift means we’re likely to see dramatic moves from both companies much sooner than expected — possibly within the next year or two.

The computing industry’s next chapter is being written, and for the first time in decades, the ending isn’t predetermined.”

Apple Silicon Changed the Conversation

(18) Steve Jobs’s last gambit: Apple M1 Chip — OM 

Written shortly after the debut of the M1 back in the fall of 2020, this excellent perspective piece really peers into the future with smart observations. Like this one:

“I don’t think AMD and Intel are Apple’s competitors. We should be looking at Qualcomm as the next significant laptop chip supplier. Apple’s M1 is going to spark an interest in new architectures from its rivals. “

The author also emphasizes that the future of computing is heterogeneous and machine learning (ML) will define the capabilities of the software of the future.

(19) Apple M1 Chip Turns 5: How It Transformed Computing Forever — Gadget Hacks 

(20) Impacts of Apple’s M1 SoC on the Technology Industry — Peer-Reviewed Paper (PDF)

Qualcomm Proved It Wasn’t Just Apple

(21) Snapdragon X Long-Term Review: Lenovo Laptop Wins As A Daily Driver — Forbes 

This general review notes Snapdragon’s performance characteristics, even under battery model, which is a hallmark feature of ARM chips. Cinebench was used for benchmarking against AMD and Intel competition. Qualcomm’s latest X2 Elite is the first ARM consumer chip over 5 GHz (see Snapdragon Summit 2025).

(22) Choosing the Right AI Laptop: Snapdragon X Elite vs AMD Ryzen AI vs Intel Core Ultra — HP Blog

HP itself makes all three kinds of laptops and does a good comparison in business general terms. One key thing it highlights is the battery life system. Both AMD and Intel mobile computers get about 12-16 hours of run time. The Snapdragon X Elite HP mobile computer gets 20-34 hours. That’s the kind of energy efficiency ARM chips offer.

Hyperscalers Follow the Physics

(23) Introducing Google’s first Arm-based CPU: Google Axion — Google

From 2024, this announcement shows that Google built the Axion using an Arm Neoverse V2 CPU at its core. Axion is a SoC like Apple Silicon but oriented for datacenter needs. A key statement made by Google in this article is:

“Amdahl’s Law suggests that as accelerators continue to improve, general-purpose computing will dominate the cost and limit the capability of our infrastructure unless we make commensurate investments to keep up.”

Amdahl’s Law is a formula that states the maximum speedup of a program is limited by the fraction of the program that cannot be parallelized (the serial portion).  What this means in the context of the data center is that the general-purpose CPU is becoming the serial portion that holds back the total system performance and efficiency. The hyperscalers are therefore investing heavily in specialized parallel accelerators: the GPU for training and the NPU for inference.

(24) From Cloud to Edge, Why Arm is Built for Scaling Your AI Stack — Arm

(25) How Arm is Winning Over AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia In Data Centers — CRN

(26) Half of Compute Shipped to Top Hyperscalers in 2025 will be Arm-based — Arm

Intel’s Countermove: 18A and Backside Power Delivery

(27) Intel 18A: See Our Biggest Process Innovation – Intel 

(28) Device Engineering: Where Ambitions and Real Silicon Collide – Intel 

This is an interesting article because it talks about how Intel flipped the fins of RibbonFET on their sides to stake them with gate-all-around. It also mentions that the fins are just 10nm apart. That doesn’t necessarily correspond to fin pitch (which is center to center), though it could possibly be the case.  Here’s a quote:

“What makes the RibbonFET hard to make is its three-dimensional intricacy. To peek into just one slice of it: Materials that form the suspended horizontal ribbons are layered across the entire bare silicon wafer first – and then etched away except where ribbons are needed. New layers are added, trenches are etched, and new materials are deposited in precise locations, sometimes atom by atom.”

(29) Intel details 18A process technology — takes on TSMC 2nm — Tom’s Hardware

(30) – Can Intel’s 18A Break TSMC’s 2nm Stronghold? – Nasqaq

Written in June of 2025, this article looks more at the business side of Intel’s 18A process node and foundry model and its technology in comparison to TSMC and Samsung. An interesting note in this article is that even Intel is hedging its bets, sort of speak, by getting on the TSMC docket as a second source for some of its upcoming Nova Lake desktop processors, expected in 2026.

While Intel’s 18A process node is delivering not one but two groundbreaking innovations, it remains to be seen whether actual chips will outperform the competition from AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, and whether Intel will beat TSMC and Samsung to market in 2026.

(31) – Nvidia and AMD plan to launch Arm PC chips as soon as 2025, Reuters reports – The Verge 

While the year is not over, this looks to not be happening, especially for Nvidia. However, a fresh story may indicate an upcoming AMD ARM chip. The story over at PCGames says that a new AMD ARM Ryzen chip has been spotted in shipping manifests.

(32) Softbank to invest $2bn in Intel as US gov’t continues to mull plans for stake of its own — DCD 

SoftBank owns most of ARM and recently acquired chipmaker Ampere Computing. Along with OpenAI, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, SoftBank is a major financial partners in OpenAI’s $500 billion AI data center effort dubbed Project Stargate. And Oracle is a major customer of Ampere Computing’s ARM chips for data centers. All of this suggests that Intel Foundry may have future customers in both Ampere and ARM itself, as it, too, is moving forward with plans to build out its own server chips.

(33) Apple and Intel are reportedly set to rekindle their chip partnership — Macworld

Industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo revealed on Twitter/X that Intel is now expected to take a role within Apple’s chip supply chain within two years. If true, this would very much signal that Intel’s Foundry Services has found its first mega customer. SoftBank’s investment in Intel would then signal that Ampere Computing would also go to Intel to produce its ARM server chips, as well as future chips from ARM in the UK itself.

What This Means for BIM and CAD

(34) The primary reason why Microsoft is pushing ARM architecture for Windows is to diversify its chip supply, improve power efficiency and battery life, drive the new “AI PC” era, and compete better with Apple’s successful Mac transition to ARM. Since mobile laptops account for a larger share of personal computers (a 4:1 ratio), Microsoft has had no choice but to push Windows for ARM to combat Apple’s growing market share, which accelerated after Apple Silicon arrived in 202o.

(35) Spatial first supports ARM support for Apple Silicon for its Mac SDKs back in its 2023.1.0 release. It has now added ARM support for Linux, which will contribute to datacenter app support. Parasolid has supported ARM chip support for much longer, starting with Android ARM in version 31.1 and then Apple Silicon for Mac in version 33.1 (June 2021). Russian C3D Labs also added ARM support to its modeling kernel in June of 2025, with versions of ARM for macOS and Android.

Rhinoceros 3D (Rhino 3D) has an in-house geometry kernel (engine) that is built around the Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) mathematical model. The company fully supports Apple Silicon at the ARM chip level. It also supports Windows on ARM at the kernel level, though OpenGL driver issues do exist. Graphisoft has its own geometry engine as well and is Apple Silicon native. And Autodesk’s proprietary geometry kernels support macOS on Apple Silicon for products like AutoCAD for Mac and Fusion 360.

Heterogeneous Compute: GPU Geometry, AI Inference, Hybrid Evaluation

(36) Exploring ARM-based SoC & Heterogeneous Compute Architecture — Druva 

This article describes the ARM big.LITTLE technology germane to the architecture. Here is a quote:

ARM big.LITTLE technology is a heterogeneous processing architecture that uses two different types of processors arranged as two clusters. Each cluster contains the same type of processor. The ”LITTLE” processors are designed for maximum power efficiency, while the ”big” processors are designed to provide maximum compute performance.

It is key to recognize that companies like Arm have spent decades refining the integration of diverse components into efficient Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). The big.LITTLE architecture has evolved into DynamicIQ architecture as total cores have scaled, which combines high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores with shared memory access, a fundamental basis of heterogeneous design principles.

(37) What Happens After Semiconductor Scaling Laws Are Broken — Cadence

(38) What are the reasons for Arm based chips outperforming existing x86 chips in performance per watt — Reddit 

(39) Why Apple Silicon is Better — Medium 

This article is from a microprocessor architect who documented his considerations for which laptop to buy. The most interesting aspect of this article is the focus on data that came from the Ahashi Linux group of developers, who are working on running a Linux kernel natively on Apple Silicon and are optimizing their kernel for the M-series hardware by reverse-engineering Apple Silicon. As such, it contains details of the M1’s GLC architecture, which is not easy information to obtain, says the author.

(40)  Qualcomm Snapdragon Takes Aim At PC Rivals Intel, AMD And Apple — Cambrian AI Research

“The laptop X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme, like the 1st generation of compute SoCs, come complete with Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU cores that deliver the application performance needed for gaming and AI. The NPU can now deliver 80 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS), which is 78% faster than Gen 1, making it the fastest NPU in the industry.”

The article makes the point that both Qualcomm and Microsoft are focusing a lot of engineering effort on the emerging AI PC market, and Qualcomm’s NPU is the critical part of the heterogeneous ARM chip to handle this.

(41) AU25: All About Autodesk’s AI Neural CAD Engines — Architosh

“These new neural CAD engines are capable of creating CAD geometry from a multi-input system-level approach. At the same time, unlike the 3D graphics that today’s AI systems, such as ChatGPT, can produce, Autodesk’s new neural CAD engines generate CAD geometry that is fully editable using traditional parametric CAD inputs as well.”

Autodesk’s Neural CAD engines (of which we saw two at AU25) utilize “inference” based compute. One of the key things Autodesk is doing is teaching its AI foundation models to “reason with CAD geometry.” This requires training (executed on big data using GPUs at hyperscalers, no doubt) versus what end users will do, “inference,” which is the reasoning itself. However, we note that Autodesk said to the press that further down the road, organizations would be able to train AI models on their own proprietary data.

The Future of BIM: The Silicon Will Decide

(42) At 19:45 on this YouTube video, Jim Keller talks about ISAs, comparing ARM ISA to x86 ISA. Keller says, “For a while we thought variable length instructions were hard to decode, but we keep figuring out how to do that.” Keller then goes on to say that if you are building a really big chip, the prediction part isn’t really dominating the die. In other words, it’s an increasingly smaller part of the die. He also noted that when RISC came out, half the chip on x86 chips was a ROM and was microcoded. But today the ROM is very tiny.

The post INSIDER Only: How Silicon Will Decide BIM’s Future – Footnotes appeared first on Architosh.

“It ties into the Vectorworks advantage,” explains Darick DeHart, chief product officer at Vectorworks. “Our feature is both vector- and raster-based, and that ties into the complications of developing it. But our hidden-line output is completely vector-based—so the depth cueing there is based on line weight.”

That statement signals a quiet revolution that advances the state of the art in BIM and CAD graphics. While most BIM platforms—Autodesk Revit among them—approach depth cueing as a purely raster-based fade, Vectorworks’ dual-engine system adds precision and control at the line level. It allows designers to fade or taper lines as they recede in perspective, layering that atop pixel-level transparency or fade-to-white effects.

Designers can bring instant clarity and spatial depth to their drawings with automated Depth Cueing in Vectorworks 2026. Line weights, tonal values, and pixel transparency adjust dynamically based on object distance in both Hidden Line and Shaded viewports, reducing the need for manual adjustments. Image courtesy of Vectorworks.

The result is not just image-making—it’s the fusion of drafting and rendering into one expressive continuum.

Two Renderings, One Vision

This duality—vector clarity meeting raster richness—has long been part of Vectorworks’ DNA. In 2026, it reaches a new synthesis.

“When you have a viewport, you can have a foreground rendering and a background rendering,” adds DeHart. “It’s literally two renderings in the same viewport.” The company’s viewport technology has always offered a layered rendering pipeline, but 2026 refines how both halves communicate.

“The types of viewports that our users really leverage this dual-rendered technology are in rendered exterior elevations and 3D sectional views,” notes Rubina Siddiqui, senior product marketing director.

Dual-rendered viewports combine crisp vector linework with rich shaded textures—allowing designers to convey structure and atmosphere in a single unified image. Image courtesy of Vectorworks.

For users, it means a drawing that breathes—line work conveying structure, shaded color carrying atmosphere. The new sliders for both raster and vector depth cueing give intuitive, non-technical control. Fade to white, fade to transparency, and taper lines by distance are all accessible to users in seconds.

“Other products have depth cueing, but the combination of raster and vector is unique,” DeHart continues. “When you compare our raster to others—like Revit—their depth cueing just fades out. In Vectorworks, pixels can fade to white, or there’s transparency at the pixel level.”

It’s a seemingly small distinction with large consequences: nuanced legibility without technical friction. Advanced graphics remain accessible—even to first-year users.

Healthy Files, Healthy Models

If Depth Cueing speaks to visual sophistication, the new File Health Checker speaks to model integrity.

“A simple thing is maybe an object that’s made out of a lot of tiny line segments,” DeHart explains. “The Health Checker is going to try to compose it for you.” Every longtime experienced Vectorworks user knows exactly what DeHart is talking about in that statement. These kinds of issues exist in all CAD programs, but the company has turned its attention seriously to giving users the power and automation to optimize the health of their files.

The new File Health Checker palette automatically scans, flags, and resolves common geometry and resource issues, helping maintain clean, high-performing models. Image courtesy of Vectorworks.

The new palette automatically scans, flags, and—in many cases—fixes common issues that slow performance or corrupt geometry. With a checklist interface, each flagged item links directly to its location in the drawing.

The system currently runs fifteen diagnostic tests grouped under Geometry, Settings, and Resources—from far-from-origin objects to overly dense polygons or complex hatches. One specific handy health check will be to find issues with Vectorworks files that have very large texture sizes or high hatch complexity. Both fall under Resource checks, but they add file-size bloat and can frustrate users.

“Importing Revit files from consultants and dealing with complex hatches are some examples,” says Siddiqui. “Those are the kinds of things that do get flagged with the Health Checker.”

While it’s not a Solibri-style model audit tool, its extensible design hints at potential. “This was designed to be expanded,” DeHart notes. “It could evolve in that direction, but I think it will instead evolve to be supportive—kind of like tech support, helping users find common problems.”

Hugues Tsafak, vice president of product development, adds that the underlying platform was intentionally built for scalability. “It could evolve into something more like Solibri if we felt that was the right direction,” he says.

Marionette, Python, and Clean APIs

Beyond visualization and health, Vectorworks 2026 continues its quiet modernization under the hood. Marionette, the company’s visual scripting environment, receives updates that keep it aligned with the core SDK.

“It mirrors and builds on our SDK,” DeHart explains. “With every version of new SDK calls, Marionette must also be updated. We cleaned up some older calls and added newer Python libraries.”

Marionette remains fully Python-based, maintaining a bridge between parametric modeling and open-source extensibility—an ongoing nod to Vectorworks’ philosophy of designer empowerment rather than constraint.

Sustainability Dashboard

Vectorworks 2026 also introduces a Sustainability Dashboard, a visual platform that unites three new sustainability tools with the existing Embodied Carbon Calculator.

The Sustainability Dashboard transforms project data into visual insight, uniting embodied carbon metrics and new sustainability tools for early-stage, data-driven design decisions. Image courtesy of Vectorworks.

“This is also a platform that could be developed more in the future,” DeHart says. “It complements our worksheet technology. It pulls data from the model like worksheets can do, but in this case, it’s a more graphical representation.”

The Dashboard transforms numeric worksheets into visual insight—bridging performance analytics with design storytelling. “It’s all part of our data strategy,” DeHart adds. “The goal is that all objects can report things to worksheets so you can utilize and check for appropriate data.”

The Embodied Carbon Calculator itself remains grounded: volumes of materials multiplied by published coefficients from university research tables established for industry standards. But placed within a dashboard, that information becomes both quickly communicative and actionable—an early signal of Vectorworks’ intent to visualize sustainability data as fluidly as it does geometry.

Assemblies, Attributes, and Fine-Grain Control

Another subtle yet significant advancement in 2026 appears in door and window assemblies. Designers can now combine windows and doors into unified units with shared sills and apply distinct graphic attributes at different detail levels. The ability to create and manage mixed assemblies enables architects to undertake larger projects, particularly when facades feature complex arrangements of doors, windows, panels, and even wall segments.

Siddiqui gives us a good example of the use of mixed assemblies in retail architecture, specifically storefronts. By combining discreet doors and windows, users can better manage, edit, and position these elements within their building’s wall systems.

Mixed assemblies are now easy to create, edit, and manage, including with styles. They can also include panel wall segments.

Related to the mixed assembly technology, Vectorworks 2026 also adds more granular control over the 2D graphics of 3D BIM elements in doors and windows. “Previously, you had one attribute for the sill,” DeHart explains. “Now, if the sill is visible in low detail, you can define those attributes separately. “It’s just greater control over the graphics of what you see.”

Tsafak elaborates: “It’s giving you more fine-grain control over the graphic attributes at 2D levels of detail.”

This refinement epitomizes Vectorworks’ long-held belief: control should expand without complexity. Attributes now appear in tabular form—clarifying relationships between components and detail scales.

Smarter Worksheets and Adaptive Tables

For architects and landscape designers alike, worksheets remain mission-critical tools in their arsenal. This release introduces an elegantly simple solution to a persistent problem: breaking large tables across sheet layouts. Part of the core updates in Vectorworks 2026, users can now slice their worksheets, position multiple slices each with header rows, and automatically set resizing layout capabilities.

“Before, users would use viewports to capture different parts of a table,” Tsafak explains. “As tables grew, they had to go back and adjust those viewports. Now that problem goes away.”

“You can slice the worksheet and position the parts where you need—they auto-adjust as tables grow or shrink,” he adds.

DeHart confirms that the improvement originated with architects but benefits every discipline. It’s one of those little-big features that define usability maturity.

Cloud Intelligence and Revit Interoperability

Vectorworks 2026 also extends its Cloud Services capabilities—pushing more workflows into high-performance remote processing.

“We’ve always used cloud processing for export,” DeHart notes. “But now we have import. We have Revit import processing on the cloud and IFC import processing in the cloud.”

This dual-direction approach means time-consuming file translation now runs off-machine—saving local resources and ensuring compatibility. Siddiqui explains why it matters: “We need to support all those stages between Revit versions. The ODA library allows us to do that.”

“Technically, it’s quite interesting,” DeHart adds. “Even the ODA library is set up to support a particular version, but on the cloud—because we have more control—we can switch libraries dynamically for whatever version we need.”

It’s a nuanced engineering feat that directly benefits architects juggling consultant models across staggered Revit cycles. But it also gives Vectorworks-based architects a killer advantage because dealing with multiple Revit versions and older versions is a pervasive challenge in the industry that the company has mastered via cloud computing.

Tsafak explains: “There are things that you can do in the cloud that you can’t do anywhere else.”

Final Thoughts: A Usability Renaissance

Beyond headline features, the 2026 release is filled with user-experience refinements: floating contextual control improvements, enhanced Quick Search, and the newly refined worksheet UI treatments beyond the splicing features.

“There are a ton of little UI updates that make the program just so much nicer to work with,” Siddiqui says. “Longtime customers will really notice.”

In aggregate, these refinements mark a maturity phase: Vectorworks advancing not only in capability but in coherence—how the pieces fit together into a seamless creative environment.

Depth Cueing, File Health Checker, Sustainability Dashboard—all reflect a singular trajectory: technology tuned to human perception. Vectorworks 2026 isn’t about complexity for its own sake. It’s about allowing designers to think visually, reason spatially, and act confidently—whether drawing depth or data.

When asked what new features they are most excited about for users, DeHart doesn’t hesitate. “We think the worksheet splitting is really exciting,” he says, smiling. “It just fits so nicely into existing workflows.”

And that may be the defining phrase for this release—fit. Depth where you need it, intelligence when you want it, and an interface that feels ready for whatever design futures emerge next.

The post Deeper Dimensions—Vectorworks 2026 Redefines BIM Visuals and Data appeared first on Architosh.

Developed by APREA, The Avenue aims to bring urban sophistication into conversation with the calm of the Gulf Coast—a kind of “urban ease, coastal spirit” fusion that Naples has never quite seen before. It’s a walkable enclave framed by galleries, restaurants, with palm-lined “alleys” and a retail base that opens generously to Naples’ public streets. Yet beyond its architectural ambition lies an equally compelling story about how visualization shaped the project’s trajectory—transforming a simple animation request into a powerful design and marketing narrative.

A Vision Evolving in Real Time

When APREA first approached Panoptikon, the European visualization studio led by Tudor Vasiliu, the initial brief was for a single film—just enough to convey the project’s mood and architectural language. But as early imagery came to life, the process began to expand.

The Avenue in Naples, Florida, is an upscale new development. World-renowned visualization studio Panoptikon shares how their work and process impacted the project and led to developer success in a town that doesn’t take new large-scale development easily. (Image: Panoptikon) (Click on image for larger view)

“What started as one animation became a full suite of 68 visuals,” Vasiliu tells me. “We developed exteriors, interiors, and atmospheric studies that helped not only market the project but also refine it. The visuals actually fed back into the design.”

That back-and-forth is not unusual today, yet in The Avenue’s case, the feedback loop became essential. The developer, deeply involved in shaping both the brand and the architecture, began to use Panoptikon’s draft renders to guide adjustments with the design team. Material choices, façade tones, and courtyard detailing were refined directly in response to what the visualization revealed.

“He would see something in a draft image,” Vasiliu explains, “and go back to the architects saying, ‘Let’s change this metal,’ or ‘That light feels wrong.’ It was a live collaboration—what we visualized became part of the design decision chain.”

The Naples Context

To appreciate the project’s impact, it helps to understand Naples itself: an affluent, Florida coastal city more known for Mediterranean motifs and manicured charm than urban experimentation. The developer, an industry veteran branching out on his own, was intent on challenging that pattern.

The Avenue from the sky fits into Naples, Florida, so well that it is hard to spot it at first. In this image, the arched block buildings are on the wide avenue running from lower left to upper right. (Image: Panoptikon) (Click on image for larger view)

“The Avenue offers something unprecedented in Naples,” says Vasiliu. “A fully activated retail ground floor, with interior alleys and courtyards turned into retail experiences. It’s an urban gesture that adds to the typology of the city rather than disrupts it.”

This sensitivity—to both place and narrative—is what distinguishes Panoptikon’s approach. Their film for The Avenue could have been a standard architectural walkthrough. Instead, they proposed something more cinematic—a mood piece that captured Naples in transition: elegant, approachable, quietly confident.

“It wasn’t about showing every apartment or corridor,” Vasiliu recalls. “It was about emotion—the light, the atmosphere, the sense of calm sophistication.”

A Classical Foundation Meets Contemporary Tools

Vasiliu’s sensitivity to story is rooted in his training. “Architecture is in my family’s blood,” he says. “Both my parents are architects, my siblings too. I was raised in studio hallways. I’m a classically trained architect—in the pre-computer sense. Pencils and airbrushes before the pixels came.”

The Avenue features a prominent pedestrian-friendly streetscape where Naples residents will find unique and name-brand retail shops, cafes, and restaurants. (Image: Panoptikon)

That analog background gives Panoptikon’s work a compositional depth that distinguishes it from algorithmic hyperrealism. The studio’s images balance photographic precision with painterly restraint, allowing architecture to feel tactile and human.

Yet their workflow is anything but nostalgic. For The Avenue film, Panoptikon relied on Chaos Vantage, a GPU-based real-time renderer tightly integrated with 3ds Max and V-Ray. “Vantage gave us the speed we needed,” Vasiliu explains. “We could update our Max scenes and instantly see the changes in real time. Compared to V-Ray alone, it saved us enormous render time.”

In an industry increasingly obsessed with turnaround speed, that matters. “Almost everyone is in a rush,” he admits. “Developers want visuals yesterday. Real-time tools like Vantage make it possible to deliver high-quality faster, without breaking the creative flow.”

The Art of Empathy

Still, technology is only one side of the equation. What emerges most clearly in conversation with Vasiliu is his insistence on empathy—the human understanding required to translate between architects, developers, and audiences.

Projecting and selling a lifestyle is a key component of value to visualizations for developers. (Image: Panoptikon)

“When clients outsource visualization abroad, they sometimes think they’re just buying images,” he says. “But what they really need is a partner—someone who understands design, who can sit patiently through iterations, and who knows that the changes architects request often come from their own clients. We see ourselves as part of that process, not outside it.”

That empathy is grounded in Panoptikon’s origins in the European market, where visualization studios often step in to resolve unfinished interiors or underdeveloped design details. “In some countries,” Vasiliu notes, “exteriors are beautifully resolved, but interiors lag behind. We had to step in creatively, helping to define lighting, materials, and even layouts. It trained us to think as designers during our visualization work.”

That blend of design literacy and visualization craft positions Panoptikon uniquely in an era when architects themselves increasingly produce high-fidelity renderings. “Yes, architects can now do what used to require a specialist,” he says, “but what they often don’t have is time. That’s where we add value—speed, consistency, and the storytelling sensibility that comes from architectural training.”

Collaborative Design by Visualization

For The Avenue, that sensibility shaped not just the images but the process itself. Panoptikon worked closely with MHK Architecture and interior designer Nainoa to visualize interiors rooted in spatial continuity—open thresholds, filtered light, and materials that flow between inside and out.

“Materiality, flow, and light merge in a series of spaces designed for both retreat and connection,” the project’s narrative reads, and the visuals reflect that ethos. Soft coastal palettes dissolve into shaded courtyards; terraces blur into living rooms under the Gulf breeze.

An interior view of one of the residential units at The Avenue, Naples, Florida. (Image: Panoptikon)

In this way, visualization became an extension of design authorship—a medium through which architects could see the implications of their own decisions before committing them to construction. “Good architecture sells itself,” says Vasiliu. “When a design already says something powerful, our job is easier. But when a design lacks that clarity, visualization can help uncover it.”

Tools, Workflows, and the Changing Landscape

Panoptikon’s toolset remains firmly rooted in Autodesk 3ds Max, despite its quirks. “It’s both a source of power and frustration,” Vasiliu laughs. “But companies like Chaos understand the psychology of artists—they’re building ecosystems that simplify workflow.”

He cites Chaos Cosmos, an integrated library of 3D assets, as one example. “It saves time and unifies standards. We’re paying for a lot—dozens of software subscriptions across rendering, collaboration, AI, and project management—but these are professional tools. Studios need to recognize that investment as part of their craft.”

That emphasis on quality and professional ethics is part of why The Avenue resonated with its stakeholders. The project not only impressed Naples’ design and development community but also catalyzed new opportunities. “The agency managing the project started recommending us left and right,” Vasiliu says. “It showed that our partnership approach works.”

The Broader Reflection

What The Avenue demonstrates is the shifting nature of architectural visualization itself. Once a passive act of representation, visualization is now a dynamic instrument of design feedback, stakeholder communication, and emotional storytelling. It’s where architecture becomes both understandable and aspirational.

For developers, visualization unlocks the lifestyle they’re selling. For architects, it tests the coherence of form and material. And for visualization studios like Panoptikon, it’s the stage where empathy meets technology—a space where design intelligence and narrative instinct merge.

“The landscape is changing,” Vasiliu reflects. “The old rules no longer apply. We have to be quick on our feet, ready for anything. But it still comes down to partnership—people who understand, who express ideas beautifully. That’s the essence of architecture itself.”

In The Avenue, that essence is tangible. What began as pixels on a screen has become a physical place that Naples hadn’t imagined before—one that embodies its coastal grace while quietly rewriting its urban story. And behind that transformation lies the evolving art of visualization: the craft of seeing before it’s built.

Editor’s Notes

Tudor Vasiliu is an architect turned architectural visualizer and the founder of Panoptikon (https://thepanoptikon.com/), an award-winning high-end architectural visualization studio serving clients globally. With over 18 years of experience, Tudor and his team help the world’s top architects, designers, and property developers realize their vision through high-quality 3D renders, films, animations, and virtual experiences. Tudor has been honored with the CGarchitect 3D Awards 2019 – Best Architectural Image, and has led industry panels and speaking engagements at industry events internationally, including the D2 Vienna Conference, State of Art Academy Days, Venice, Italy, and Inbetweenness, Aveiro, Portugal – among others.

The post When Renders Talk Back: Panoptikon and the New Role of Visualization in Design appeared first on Architosh.

This year, only five members of the press were invited, including Architosh, to an event at the Corinthia Hotel with an announced attendance of 500-plus, including Graphisoft customers, partner resellers, user presenters, software partners, distant and local members of the Graphisoft organization, and the parent company, Nemetschek. Clearly different, and to say that there was energy at this event would be an understatement.

An Origin Story

One very notable guest this year was Gábor Bojár, who founded Graphisoft in 1982. Bojár was recognized at the opening of the conference by Graphisoft CEO Daniel Csillag and spoke later at a reception back on the company campus, where he told the origin story that has become Graphisoft lore and helped to orient the event in a very meaningful and important way… even 43 years later after the company was born.

Back in 1982, using a cash award from the Hungarian Ministry of Power for solving a planning challenge for the installation of a Soviet nuclear power plant, Bojár and István Gábor Tari, an assistant professor in Budapest, wrote their fledgling software “RadarCh” for the Apple Lisa. They met Steve Jobs in 1984, where Jobs encountered this precursor to Archicad at the CeBIT international trade fair in Hannover, Germany. Jobs was so taken with Graphisoft’s 3D software that he subsequently supported its development for the original Macintosh, one of which had to be taken apart and smuggled into Hungary through Hanover, Germany, during the Cold War.

Jobs saw an early version of Archicad (called RadarCh) on the Apple Lisa computer in Germany and became a supporter of the company from that moment on. Not only is Graphisoft forever grateful for Jobs and Apple, but it is also a passionate study of the company’s innovative ethos, which they skillfully embrace in Budapest. (Image: Architosh)

Bojár had a vision of Budapest as the Silicon Valley of developing Central Europe. And the communist economic climate of Cold War Hungary was poised to accelerate Graphisoft with young talent eager to work with Bojár. Graphisoft grew from a small two-person company to an international BIM software company in the AEC industry, where growth outperformed a strong design market in 2024.

This origin story echoed in the introductory remarks of Graphisoft CEO Daniel Csillag, Nemetschek CEO Yves Padrines, and others throughout the conference. Clearly, the legacy and development with Apple continues to be central in the company’s vision and DNA. Daniel started the event by discussing what Graphisoft hoped to achieve with its software: giving architects the freedom to design.

He said, “Archicad feels more like dancing than wrestling.” This belief and focus on the user was inherited from the beginning with Apple, and central and true as Steve Jobs himself would have argued that the customer experience should be the starting point. 

Nemetschek Group CEO Yves Padrines followed Daniel on stage, giving a brief history of how Professor Nemetschek started out as a small engineering company and grew into what is today the second-largest software company in Germany (behind SAP of Walldorf, Germany) and one of the largest software companies in Europe. 

Complimenting Daniel’s perspective, Yves noted that this is “no time for business as usual.” He stated that the construction industry was facing many challenges and needed to be more proactive, efficient, and sustainable. For Nemetschek, all brands, including Graphisoft, were advancing with generative and agentic AI solutions. Yves also noted that Bluebeam recently integrated AI and is currently collaborating with Stanford University on Facility Information Management (FIM). And most importantly, echoing the dance metaphor Daniel mentioned, AI must be ethical, trustworthy, and complementary to enable and enhance “augmented” professionals, in which AI works for the professionals and the users remain central and in total control.

Danial Csillag, CEO of Graphisoft, speaks on stage at Graphisoft IGNITE 2025 about the company’s origin story, with its roots firmly planted in Steve Jobs’ landmark Mac computer. An audience of over 500 listened, many of them hearing this story for the first time.

Yves said now was the season of intelligence, and that it was central to the Nemetschek Group, which has over 7 million users worldwide. That growth and scale were apparent in the work they brought to the conference to share, and the impact, responsibility, and opportunity were clear. “Go to San Francisco if you want to wrestle!” Yves joked.

Even here, Nemetschek and Graphisoft demonstrated strong alignment in their vision for AI—one grounded in a user-first, human-centered philosophy. Their focus remains clear: advancing the “software-to-customer” experience, where delivering the best design experience is both the mission and the measure. Graphisoft stands today as a vigorous design-technology company, carrying forward the rebel spark of Steve Jobs’ Macintosh era and the bold, risk-embracing spirit of its founder, Gábor Bojár.

Nemetschek Group CEO Yves Padrines, when talking about AI-augmented professionals, had a term for it, calling such professionals “Dual Athletes.”

In closing on comments about AI, Yves said, “We are not here to replace human expertise, but to augment it.” From this perspective, the company is being patient with AI in a manner that feels careful, calculated, and measured. Throughout the conference, they noted the disruptive force AI has become, but their unfaltering focus on the user experience is acting like a governor on exactly how and how fast AI features are arriving for its users. The message was clear: keep the designer at the center, even as algorithms advance.

The Best Design Experience

While there were no surprise software release announcements from Graphisoft, there were many presentations that built on the theme of “the best design experience” and then integrated the current software, highlighted in customer presentations. 

Guest speaker and moderator, Fred Mills of The B1M, kicked off the presentations (he also led two panels discussing design, AI, and current and future challenges) with a very ambitious world tour of amazing projects over his last ten years, and challenged the audience to imagine the next ten years to come. 

Luca Bernardoni from Archilinea, based in Italy, discusses his massive project with Lamborghini at IGNITE 2025. (Image: Pete Evans / Architosh)

Luca Bernardoni from Archilinea, based in Italy, kicked off the keynote presentations and presented their projects with supercar companies Lamborghini and Ferrari. These companies presented supercar project expectations, which Luca expressed as extraordinary challenges, including one particular request to switch software design platforms. This request was refused as Archilinea held steadfast on their use of Archicad, not just out of loyalty, but out of a shared passion for what they knew they could accomplish with Archicad.

And Archilinea amazingly delivered a pair of frenetic-paced projects, including building a new firm around a young, inexperienced, yet optimistic and talented team. And the supercar manufacturing projects, which were massive in scale, were delivered successfully on time. (Editor’s note: We believe readers can still watch all these presentations by signing up here.) 

Marko Dabrović from 3LHD, based in Zagreb, Croatia, presented their work that also included a strong emphasis on a supercar facility for RIMAC, a new supercar company in Croatia. The project’s complexity — coordinating over 300 stakeholders — required 3LHD’s “Total Design” philosophy, executed in Archicad with partners BIMCollab and Volum3.

Notably, 3LHD created Volum3 as a common data environment (CDE) itself to solve the communications challenges and inefficiencies they (and the rest of the AEC/O industry) faced. This software spinoff emerged directly from their design practice. Both the RIMAC facility design and the Volum3 software exemplify the same principle: an open, collaborative design experience that delivered remarkable results.

Marko Dabrović from 3LHD, based in Zagreb, Croatia, also presented massive-scale car industry projects, among many other stunning buildings, from Four Season hotels to their own stunning office, which was a brilliant adaptive reuse of an abandoned city theater building.

Both Archilinea of Italy and 3LHD of Croatia showed how Archicad and the rest of Graphisoft’s software portfolio best meet their needs to be design-centric, leading architecture practices serving some of the biggest global clients, from Lamborghini and Ferrari to the Four Seasons Hotels. The scale and complexity of car manufacturing companies, in particular, convincingly demonstrate the capacity of Graphisoft’s Open BIM philosophy, as all projects require working with a vast array of professionals and tools from multiple vendors.

Nick Markham, IGNITE’s emcee and a senior manager at Graphisoft, smoothly integrated several company presentations throughout the day’s keynotes, including Martin Kiss, Graphisoft’s Chief Product Officer, who spoke about the human experience, design, and the ideas of exploration and the importance of protecting the design experience. This brought the recently announced Archicad 29, MEP Designer, and Project Aurora all into the immediate conversation, but with a steadfast user focus. 

AI Assistant and AI at Nemetschek

Later, in a 1:1 interview following the first morning of presentations, Mártin Kiss also emphasized that new products and innovative features were based on pragmatic, user-centered decisions. For instance, AI was not new to Graphisoft, and Project Aurora was built on multiple years of product development, including informal internal company meetups and annual ideation and innovation internal GRID competitions. It also included early collaborations with Nemetschek and Google.

This steady, measured progress in AI resulted in a highly interactive AI Visualizer, originally based on Stable Diffusion, and continued progress with AI through the soon-to-be-released AI Assistant, currently in beta across Graphisoft’s software. Back in 2024, at the AIA National Convention, the company showcased an interactive augmented reality AI interface in a provocative demonstration that matched AI efforts offered on other platforms. Yet Graphisoft understands innovation and demonstration, but not at the expense of its priorities. 

Vice President of AI at Nemetschek Group, Julian Geiger, reviews the key principles of AI within the whole Group. These are core to any daughter company’s view of AI and therefore are Graphisoft’s principles, which overlay their Best Design Experience values.

And the number one priority for Graphisoft is to focus on the best design experience. Graphisoft knows that the AI era is just in its infancy. Taking lessons from history—and the company it looks up to (Apple)—Graphisoft also knows that in the AI era, there likely isn’t any significant “first-mover advantage” like there can be in other aspects of the software and tech industry. If AI is like the Internet, then one can think of AOL and where it is today. If AI is more likely similar to humankind’s mastery of fire (which is what many experts think AI is more equivalent to), then what happens to all of us after AI is a great unknown. Graphisoft has been first many times in the AEC and BIM industry, including back in 2014 with its BIMserver with Delta technology and with BIMx and multi-core utilization. Being first with a specific AI capability today likely means little. As we can already see, in the larger computer industry, AI chatbots are not particularly sticky. That’s because they are not tools in the grand software sense, but more like entities with a nascent sense of agency and a massive sense of intelligence. Therefore, people will seek out multiple agents, and stickiness may come down to more personal aspects.

Julien Geiger said at one point that AI is like an alien intelligence. And humans are deeply curious about alien intelligences, if we want to go down that metaphoric road.

So the Nemetschek Group’s VP of AI, Julian Geiger, outlined the broader AI trajectory underpinning not just Project Aurora and Graphisoft’s AI strategies but those of the entire Nemetschek Group. He highlighted the growing capabilities of AI—generalization, complex reasoning, multimodality, goal pursuit, and even elements of theory of mind—as a shift from a 20th-century to a truly 21st-century model of intelligence. Unlike industries such as finance or manufacturing, where standardization enables faster AI adoption, AEC requires systems capable of deep semantic understanding and flexible reasoning to address the uniqueness of every project.

Nemetschek Group VP of AI Julian Geiger speaks about AI technologies within Graphisoft and the Group, within the larger context of the AEC industry. AI adoption lags behind other industries, which have natural advantages for the adoption of AI, including large and available data sets (Finance) and product standardization (Automotive and Manufacturing), whereas AEC lacks both and actually thrives as an industry that is “anti-standardization.”

AI for AEC really requires more advancement in foundational AI technologies. While inferencing on LLMs can be useful for AEC pros seeking knowledge and advice on things like building codes and how to use their advanced software, for AEC to truly leverage AI requires multimodal agentic AI, deep semantic understanding, and goal-pursuit capabilities. AEC needs AI to truly understand our AEC world, which means breaking down our problems into layers and, at the highest level, utilizing Theory of Mind capabilities.

Theory of Mind means that when two people are talking, they can understand what the other person may be thinking. The “augmented professional” in AEC is thus in pursuit of AI technologies that can, at their highest form, anticipate what we are thinking with great accuracy, and thus anticipate us. AI will be able to do that as well. Here again is Graphisoft focusing on the “best design experience,” even in this focus on AI.

Project Aurora

So Graphisoft’s AI strategy seems clear. And as Daniel Csillag publicly confirmed, Aurora will be released next year in its first phase, but it will also be modular and nimble enough to change, because who knows where AI will be in three years! 

Graphisoft CEO Daniel Csillag is talking about what is confirmed for product and technology releases in 2026. Graphisoft 29 and MEP Designer are now released alongside beta versions of AI Assistant. Project Aurora is rolling out in 2026.

Project Aurora, described by Director of Product Management János Detré as “high-level BIM” and the “GPS for design,” represents the first generation of Graphisoft’s next evolution in design intelligence. In its initial phase, Aurora focuses on early-stage project design and feasibility analysis—bridging the gap between design intent (what should be built) and design realization (what is actually built). The tool aims to guide architects toward more informed design decisions through tightly integrated conceptual logic. While Archicad continues to lead in detailed design, coordination, and documentation, Project Aurora will serve as the intelligent front end of the process—helping architects navigate from concept to clarity.

Project Aurora is cloud-based and will deliver what Graphisoft calls “high-level BIM,” focused on early-stage project design and feasibility analysis. It meets the general definitional terms of a true BIM 2.0 software tool and will have a direct bi-directional connection to Archicad, which will focus future development on detailed design, coordination, and documentation.

So the Graphisoft Design Intelligence Strategy is captured in one key chart from the IGNITE conference. The “Design Cycle” spans two key phases: (1) design optimization and (2) detailed BIM development. High-level BIM is the domain of Project Aurora. Site potential, space design, and sustainability are all major topical domains of “high-level” BIM, with digital capabilities like AI generative design and AI-powered project intelligence. Pushing high-level designs to Archicad then enables architects to develop structures and MEP systems, focus on building components and units, and, of course, architectural details. As shown by the arrow at the bottom of the chart, continuous iterations and refinements are possible in a bi-directional loop.

Project Aurora is due in 2026 in its initial phased roll-out. The cloud-based platform will include CScale’s engine, enabling comprehensive energy and carbon analysis.

We can imagine API connections working inside Project Aurora, powering additional capabilities. As it stands today, CScale’s APIs are the technology behind its energy and carbon analysis features, and if Aurora is to be truly reflective of the metaphor of “GPS for design,” then tools like energy analysis need to act on accurate forms, layouts, and shapes of buildings, and thus bringing Rhino into Aurora seems like the next logical step.

Closing Comments

It will be important to watch Graphisoft’s AI strategy unfold. Julian’s chart on a new generation of AI shows the six domains of capability critical to enabling AEC to leverage AI to the same degree as industries like finance and manufacturing. Since late 2022, we have gone from chatbots to reasoners to agents—that is, AI that can take actions on our behalf. Agents emerged in 2025. Yet, beyond that, Julian showed that in 2026, we will have “innovators”—AI that can aid in invention. He cited Alphaevolve, where AI at Google in May of this year discovered novel algorithms for previously unsolved math problems. As said earlier, artificial intelligence (AI) is likely more akin to the human mastery of fire, an invention with unforeseen secondary effects. AI is far bigger an invention than the telephone, the TV, or the Internet. 

Fire was a multi-staged invention. It first led to warmth and cooked food having a profound effect on human health and survival. Eventually, it led to metallurgy, turning ore into metal weapons and metal tools like the plowshare, which revolutionized farming and food production. Fire alone didn’t take mankind out of the Stone Age; it took the secondary invention of using it to melt ore that led us to the Bronze Age. Yves Padrines, CEO of Nemetschek, said AI will transform us into “augmented professionals” and encouraged us to become dual athletes — meaning learning to augment our human expertise with AI.

Julian Geiger discusses the different types of AI capabilities that lie ahead of us.

In closing, Graphisoft IGNITE 2025 brought together many speakers from architecture and design with many different perspectives. From computational design and large-scale projects that would break other software, to exceptional design in which the architect said Archicad wasn’t a noticeable tool in the process, but had developed into a foundational and inseparable way in which they developed their designs. Graphisoft demonstrated the importance of user-centered design and how it has benefited their continued growth and their position today as a leader in AEC/O software. 

And where an industry needs help to advance, Graphisoft and Nemetschek have continuously and enthusiastically supported “open design”— as members of the Open Design Alliance and a persistent champion of Open BIM — to better deliver the built environment around the world. Consistent with this open design ethos is its insistence that its innovations be available on both Mac and Windows platforms, as evidenced by the new MEP Designer, a tool for MEP engineers to go from concept to complete documentation. At the same time, DDScad, BIMcloud, and BIMx have all improved in this fall’s updates. 

The new MEP Designer is a game-changing BIM solution for MEP engineers that works as a module built on Archicad and thus is both Mac and Windows native. Engineers can use it from concept to full CD documentation as their BIM platform for full MEP.

And this open design ethos continues beyond Graphisoft Park. Originally announced last year and updated at the 2025 Graphisoft IGNITE, this effort was also presented as continuing to advance, with a direct connection to Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) and file and issue management syncing. And this includes platform (Nemetschek) unification around BIMx as well. Graphisoft and Nemetschek understand the complexity and continue to aspire to make it a dance for everyone involved, including their sister brands. 

As eloquently expressed in his closing conference presentation, practitioner and BIM manager Moiyez Bush from DKO in Australia/SE Asia, says it takes a community to build a building. Graphisoft starts with its community and continues to innovate around it. They have centered their vision on being the best design experience, user-focused, user-friendly, intuitive, and powerfully integrated into an ecosystem of project design collaboration and productivity. 

The best design experience mixed with a bit of rebel DNA.

Image Credits

Title image credit: MJE House, Jacobsen Arquitetura, Brazil. Photo: ©Leonardo Finotti / Architosh. All rights reserved.

Format equates to “party with copyright” / “party with reserved rights of use.” (eg: image: FJMT / Architosh. All rights reserved.) 

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The Competition

Then the competition came. Up the California coast in a quiet town named Carpinteria, just south of the famed city of Santa Barbara, Procore emerged with a force, and the digitization of the construction market became supercharged. Others took notice.

In the years before COVID-19, the battle shifted in AEC construction from PDF markup dominance to comprehensive construction management software. The CDE (common data environment) became the holy grail to pursue, and several US and foreign companies had a great head start. Meanwhile, PDF-based markup has remained vital, even crucial, and continues to be so today.

Bluebeam CEO Usman Shuja on stage at Unbound 2025 in Washington DC earlier this month, as he introduces the upcoming Bluebeam MAX, an AI-infused set of Bluebeam offerings. (Image: Bluebeam, Inc.)

For a while, it seemed that Bluebeam’s next move was to compete head-on with the CDE systems. Its parent company articulated a grand CDE strategy that failed to materialize. (see: Architosh, “Architosh Exclusive—Nemetschek Group Unveils Its CDE Strategy with Bluebeam Technology at its Core,” 13 Dec 2017). Bluebeam entered its “wilderness years” and needed to regroup. They made a fateful move to abandon Revu on Mac after years of pent-up demand for it. Then Apple Silicon came, and Mac laptops surged with world-leading performance and battery life. Talk about bad timing.

This faux pas coincided with the company’s come-to-Jesus moment, but it certainly was not the cause of it.

Something needed to change.

Enter current CEO Usman Shuja, who, along with longtime Bluebeam co-founder Don Jacob, is bringing strategic clarity to the famed construction software darling whose users are now sitting at just under 4 million worldwide, according to the keynote on day one of Unbound.

2D Drawings, Markup, AI

After the BIM-ification of AEC, the emergence of the CDE, and the failed promises of industrial construction (think Katerra’s epic failure), it turns out that 2D drawings (blueprints as they used to be called) still matter. They matter a lot. They are the lingua franca of how designs and work get documented. They operate globally in construction, using a single file format: PDF. When it comes to PDF markup in AEC, Bluebeam essentially stands alone. And now in the era of AI agents, the 2D documents that make up the majority of data in the building industry can be surfaced by AI agents; they can be understood, translated, summarized, monitored, edited, shared, counted, measured, and a lot more.

2D documents remain the primary means by which the communication of design gets translated into building construction. This may never actually change or at least not for a decade or more. Where Bluebeam excels is in collaboration around a set of design and construction documents by the architecture and engineering professionals who create them. 

To bolster its leadership in markup, Bluebeam is marshaling AI technologies both via tuck-in acquisitions and also home-grown innovations. Its implementation of Anthropics’s Claude AI agent and MCP server technology offers almost limitless possibilities. 

Anthropic’s MCP technology enables users to tell an AI agent to do things in the software that are possible for the human user to do, but incredibly time-consuming. Instead of the user manually taking a series of actions in Revu, the MCP server orchestrates the entire process and basically runs the software functions to accomplish the task. An example might be finding and converting all Bluebeam Revu markup text that is not in all-caps and converting it to all-caps. This was the example we saw behind the the power of Bluebeam Max. 

Luke Prescott, Sr. Director of Product Management (Head of Product) on stage at Unbound. He walked the audience through a series of new capabilities including home-grown AI features and those those involving MCP servers and Anthropic’s Claude. (Image: Bluebeam, Inc.)

Yet the real power is how AI agents can surface the data, not just in Revu markups but in the actual PDF itself. The PDFs then become your little data lake from which inference functions can take place. In the case of Firmus-AI’s technology, the software can surface the PDF construction drawings and find omissions, scope gaps, and a range of other issues.

MORE: Bluebeam unveils AI-powered Bluebeam Max at Unbound 2025

Humans today are responsible for reviewing construction drawings for completeness and accuracy. It is an arduous task that takes experience and a consistent, rigorous methodology in order to do it reliably. In the architecture or engineering office, failure can result in change orders or, if missed in the field, costly construction mistakes. At the general contractor’s office, missing issues early means finding them too late during construction and paying the price in costly schedule delays. 

Firmus-AI was a superb tuck-in acquisition for Bluebeam. Seemingly unknown, the rumor is that a major VC firm active in the AEC industry began talking to them, and when Nemetschek learned of this, they moved in and offered to acquire them.

Tackling Pain in AEC

Firmus-AI is the type of ideal tuck-in acquisition for Bluebeam. Their specific innovations contained both “pain-killers” and “vitamins” types of technologies. Let me unpack that a bit. There are plenty of AI startups creating interesting new solutions, but many of them aren’t truly addressing today’s existing pain points in the industry; they are more like vitamins, making the AEC user’s workflow more robust and stronger, but they are not taking away real pain in existing workflows.

Firmus-AI’s matching technology is a bit like that; it overlaps with existing document compare technology Revu already has, but does it better and more completely, and makes those workflows more robust, introducing workflows users may not have realized they needed to have. In contrast, Firmus-AI review technologies tackle head-on the mundane and time-consuming tasks of comprehensive document review. This is not a vitamin but a bonafide pain-killer and offers one of the most exciting developments for Bluebeam’s future. (see: Architosh, “Bluebeam unveils AI-powered Bluebeam Max at Unbound 2025,” 1 Oct 2025)

Details Told to Press Only

In our small presser, Bluebeam executives Don Jacob and Luke Prescott answered all of our questions. One question this author asked had to do with Firmus.AI technology integration in Revu or Bluebeam Cloud. In the short term, Firmus will be integrated into calls that pass files into the Firmus cloud system itself (which is where Firmus.AI lives today). Then, in the future, the firm code itself will be brought into the desktop Revu and into Bluebeam Cloud (BBC).

MORE: Bluebeam acquires Firmus AI—accelerating drawing reviews

We also asked about the Mac and if the ARM version of Revu meant it would be easier to port Revu back to the Mac again, since it was already on it not long ago. The answer is, yes, the ARM on Windows version of Revu—which was in high demand by Bluebeam Revu users in the field—does make the Mac Revu effort a bit easier, but they are still not committed to it. This is actually progress. In the past, there was an absolute no to Revu on Mac. This time, an absolute no to Mac does not exist. But there is no plan for it either. (see: Architosh, “AIA25: Bluebeam supercharges performance, new integrations,” 11 Jun 2025)

Yves Padrines, CEO of the Nemetschek Group was also on stage to tout the benefits of the whole Group’s technology portfolio and how that benefits Bluebeam users.

Instead, the Mac Revu story plan has an interesting twist. There has been much consternation about Revu on the iPad and its lack of love by the company. The much-beloved Revu on iPad will finally be retired in late December of 2025, and users are encouraged to embrace the latest versions of Bluebeam for iOS and Android instead. These are much improved versions and part of a refocus on the importance of mobile.

The Mac strategy (at this moment) is actually an Apple iOS strategy. Because ARM-based Macs can run iOS apps natively, the goal is to enable Mac users to run Bluebeam on iOS versions well on their Macs. This works beautifully with Apple Silicon Macs only, but those are the computers users want to use anyway. While no specific timelines were mentioned, this was the point outlined in the presser. In the meantime, the 30% faster performance of Revu running on Apple M-series Macs running Parallels is an excellent choice given the industry-leading single-core performance Apple currently enjoys. 

Growth and Forward

Luke Prescott stated that Bluebeam is hyper-focused on the importance of mobile, supporting both iOS and Android. While iOS is the dominant mobile platform in North America, Android is also critical for the company in foreign markets.

One thing that Prescott stated was that, compared to other mobile markup solutions in the industry, including its own past versions, markup was actually on an “image of a PDF, not the PDF itself.” Bluebeam has now mastered this, and its markups also meet the latest ISO standards for PDF markup.  

With its new Stitching feature, Revu can now assemble multiple drawing segments into a single, continuous sheet—a breakthrough for transportation projects where plans often span several pages. Civil engineers are likely to embrace this powerful upgrade as Bluebeam continues to expand its footprint in the infrastructure side of the AEC industry.

Co-founder and former CTO Don Jacob talks about the new Stitching feature in Bluebeam Revu which will be a huge win for civil engineering workflows with long bridges and roads that never fit on a single page. (Image: Bluebeam, Inc.)

And speaking of growth, at just under 4 million users, Bluebeam noted that one-third of new users come from North America, the largest AEC market in the world. Other bright spots for growth include France and Germany and market verticals. In addition to verticals like infrastructure, Bluebeam sees expanding market presence in related verticals like energy and manufacturing, all of which are set to grow in reconstruction builds in war zones like Ukraine and Gaza.

Finally, in thinking about mobile again, Bluebeam’s acquisition of GoCanvas means that the company will benefit from and leverage its “field-first” technologies, first through integrated workflows and later through code-level integrations. This field-first technology stack bolsters Bluebeam’s ability to serve AEC users more deeply via personal-based thinking. The workflow needs of a construction professional who is always in the trailer are different than the needs of a professional who is always in the field. And both are different than the exacting needs of architects, engineers and other stakeholders.

In closing, Bluebeam Max, the company’s new AI-centric offering coming in 2026, will significantly improve the workflows of Bluebeam users today, through the smart leveragings of AI agents like the Claude technology integration from Anthropic. At the same time, the company seems much more certain about its strategic directions and what its users are looking for next.

The post Bluebeam Rebounds: The Comeback of Construction’s Original Digital Rebel appeared first on Architosh.

AU25 Tour

Invited media to Autodesk University 2025, got a personal tour of Nissan Stadium a few weeks ago, led by the digital leads and project manager for the joint-venture construction team. Turner Construction Co., AECOM Hunt, ICF Builders, and Polk & Associates Construction, Inc. are the four leading companies involved in the joint venture on the construction of Nissan Stadium, with Manica Architecture as the lead design architect.

Nissan Stadium was designed by Manica Architecture, which also designed Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. The new NFL stadium will represent the state-of-the-art in NFL venues with multiple levels of innovation. (Image: Nissan Stadium/Manica Architecture)

Nissan Stadium has some notable features, including an enclosed translucent roof (non-retractable) circular roof made of a high-tech material called ETFE (a lightweight glass substitute). The material allows natural light to penetrate the interior of the stadium while protecting fans from the weather. Since the new stadium will be fully environmentally closed, it will enable the facility to host major year-round events, such as the Super Bowl, Final Four, and WrestleMania. It can also serve as a major music concert venue for superstars like Taylor Swift.

Innovations

The stadium will also be the first NFL stadium to feature fully frictionless concession stands, eliminating the need for waiting in lines to purchase food and drinks. You are probably wondering how this works. The frictionless concessions work by combining advanced technologies like computer vision, sensor fusion, artificial intelligence (AI), and specialized weight sensors. All that technology allows fans to simply grab items and walk out with the payment happening automatically.

A fan must be registered in the system via an app or payment method. Once they enter the concession stand, a network of cameras and sensors tracks their movements and monitors which items the customer selects and places in their basket. The virtual cart is then processed when they go back to their seat, and they are charged for the payment.

Other innovations in the architectural design include closer seating and superior sight lines. Nissan Stadium pulls fans closer to the action than any other NFL stadium, with seats up to 38% closer to the field compared to the current venue. Titan fans are going to love this new experience.

The Ring of Fire LED display system sits up top, just under the roof level, and thus can create the illusion that the roof is floating, as shown in this image. (Image: Nissan Stadium/Manica Architecture)

Besides the intimate viewing experience, the main concourse will have a 360-degree connection, allowing fans to completely walk around the seating bowl and enjoy dynamic views from all angles. There will also be extensive outdoor terraces with stunning views of Nashville’s exciting skyline and the Cumberland River, providing social spaces for fans to mingle when the action gets boring or hopeless.

Finally, a 2,275-foot LED “Ring of Fire” display (equal to six football fields) will wrap around the terrace level of the seating bowl, keeping fans connected to the action.

Digital Tools: Tour Info

On the tour, we learned that the mixed use of steel and concrete structural systems had many reasons for their use. In some cases, steel was used up high at the roof levels because steel was the optimal system for structural economy and architectural aesthetics. At the main levels of the concourses, systems tended to dominate. At the lowest level, at the level of the playing surface, some steel structures were used to support grandstands very close to the fields. These were selected as steel because they can be removed for special occasions or events.

Members of the Autodesk University media on tour of the new Nissan Stadium. (Image: Architosh)

Being connected to Autodesk University 2025, it was no surprise to learn that the design and build teams utilized many of Autodesk’s leading AEC software tools. At the same time, we also learned—and expected—that a billion-dollar structure of this magnitude would require dozens of different software solutions used at some point in the entire process, including both Autodesk and non-Autodesk solutions.

Revit for BIM

For the main design and pre-construction phases, Autodesk Revit was the primary BIM platform used to create the principal design and engineering models, including architecture, structural, and MEP systems models. With Autodesk Revit, the leading BIM authoring solution in North America, it came as no surprise to find a building with this complexity developed entirely on Revit. However, other BIM platforms were also utilized during the design and detailing stages, including Trimble’s Tekla, which served as the primary BIM tool for the steel structural work.

Autodesk Construction Cloud (now Forma) served as the common data environment (CDE) for all project partners, but the AECOM and Turner Construction professionals on the tour explained that Revizto was used as the BIM federation model environment for BIM model coordination. Interestingly, this editor asked if both Revit and IFC models were federated together inside Revizto, since tools like Tekla and Revizto are Open BIM-oriented solutions. The answer was somewhat surprising in its negative nature. All BIM models from other formats were first translated into the Revit format and then imported into Revizto.

Your editor-in-chief at the Nissan Stadium at AU25. The stadium is going to have to be a bucket list event to watch an NFL game here. The design is so innovative. (Image: Architosh)

This signifies how critical the Revit file format actually is in the North American construction market and how much the IFC format has fallen back as an open, industry-neutral BIM file format, in the United States, especially. At the same time, large projects like Nissan Stadium require best-in-breed solutions that sometimes are outside the Autodesk ecosystem, presenting an interoperability challenge that Autodesk has noted in its own keynotes, resulting in up to six hours of lost time for construction professionals per week. This is where Autodesk is continuing to advance its technologies to address interoperability challenges between various vendors’ software systems.

MORE: AU25 Mainstage: AI Takes the Mic in Nashville

During construction, AECOM continued to use Revit as subcontractors create their fabrication models. They would also use Autodesk Desktop Connector to link fabrication models to design models, which facilitates real-time collaboration. For reality capture, they utilized several different systems, including DroneDeploy.

Final Thoughts

The Nissan Stadium represents the state-of-the-art in stadium venue design. With a budget exceeding $2.2 billion USD, the approximately 60,000-seat, 2.1 million-square-foot enclosed facility will likely exceed expectations and be the pride and joy of Music City (Nashville).

However, a structure this large, with over 130 suites, 33 elevators, 44 escalators, 19,000 tons of structural steel, and sustainability-designed systems, isn’t a walk in the park for AEC professionals. It required the expertise of top design, engineering, and construction professionals, utilizing state-of-the-art digital tools and communication protocols, to enable optimal collaboration and performance in design and construction.

The post Nissan Stadium in Nashville—Get’s It Done with Autodesk Innovation appeared first on Architosh.

MORE: AU25: All About Autodesk’s AI Neural CAD Engines

In this feature article, we will conclude our coverage by tying it to our previous AU25 reports, while deepening our technical information and broadening our industry perspective. While the California-headquartered company has many announcements, we will focus intently on the AEC/O industry implications of Autodesk’s cloud and AI initiatives. After all, these have great potential to transform how Autodesk customers work on their projects.

Before we delve into the AI technologies at AU25, let’s recap the Forma story, as it’s crucial for several reasons.

The Future is Forma

In the past, AU’s attendees heard promises of the future around Forma. This year, Autodesk delivered both new Forma products and cloud consolidation all under the Forma brand. Now, cloud visions for AEC/O are becoming more tangible in the Autodesk world, and everything runs through Forma (or will soon enough). 

Autodesk President and CEO Andrew Anagnost on stage on Day One at AU25, discussing the end-to-end cloud-based AI-native technologies that are transforming Autodesk solutions for industries like AEC and D&M. (Image: Autodesk).

As we wrote in this report (see: Architosh, “AU25: What’s New in the Forma AECO Industry Cloud,” 18 Sep 2025), Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) is now getting tucked into the Forma cloud. This is all part of the effort to unify a cloud-based environment for planning, designing, and building and operations professionals.

The CDE Story

This even impacts the naming of older products. Autodesk Docs, the company’s common data environment (CDE) for AEC/O, is now officially Forma Data Management. This constant habit of renaming products is confusing, and CEO Andrew Anagnost even acknowledged that on stage in Nashville. But the company aims to get things cleaner and straighter under a grand Forma umbrella. With Forma Data Management, Autodesk’s renamed CDE, information is expected to flow across all phases of the project’s lifecycle and from tool to tool, including cloud to desktop.

In our previous report (see: Architosh, “AU25: Autodesk Introduces Forma Building Design,” 16 Sep 2025), we noted that Revit is to be the first “Forma Connected Client” as part of the push to connect Autodesk’s legacy desktop AEC solutions to the Forma industry cloud. The goal is simple: customer design data can move freely between solutions in the Forma cloud and desktop solutions, while features and capabilities of the Forma cloud can be piped into desktop solutions that are Forma Connected Clients. (see image below).

Forma’s environmental analysis tools seen here inside Autodesk Revit. Amy Bunzel, EVP, Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Solutions, told a small AEC-centric media group that there are two ways this happens. One way is through a web-browser like viewport inside the Forma Connected Client, the other way is the capabilities themselves, their logic or computational functions can be API-connected into the Forma Connected Client. Bunszel said both will happen. (Image: Autodesk)

While Autodesk rebrands its products and introduces cloud tools, AI technologies, and data flow strategies, its loyal customers adjust, adapt, and move with them. But they are not just moving, they are leveraging the benefits that come with a connected cloud digital ecosystem. The expansion of the Denver International Airport is just one example of a customer story where the end-user (DEN, locals refer to it as DIA) acknowledged that the cloud was vital to their project’s success, and without it, the project would have taken longer and cost much more.

Vision 100: DEN

Vision 100 is the project name for the expansion of Denver International Airport, which will increase DEN’s capacity from its original 50 million passengers to 100 million. DEN is the 6th most busy international airport in the world and presently serves 82.3 million passengers, far beyond its ideal physical limits, thus the Vision 100 project.

Exemplar Autodesk customer product, the terminal expansion at Denver International Airport (DEN). (Image: Autodesk)

At AU25, the media had the opportunity to listen to Brendan Dillon, Director of Digital Facilities and Infrastructure at Denver International Airport, discuss the project’s scope, complexity, and challenges, as well as how Autodesk AEC software was utilized to execute the project.

Brendan Dillon, Director of Digital Facilities and Infrastructure at Denver International Airport, discusses the Vision 100 project which will bring up the capacity of DEN to 100 million passengers served annually. This was the first project where the airport used Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC). (Image: Architosh)

The Vision 100 expansion project was the first time DEN used Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC), now integrated into the Forma cloud. Brendon Dillon said that at any given time, they were working with more than 100 contractors and thousands of workers. Brendan’s team uses AutoCAD, Revit, and Autodesk Civil3D as their core design software.

Tandem Digital Twin

They also utilized the digital twin software Autodesk Tandem to consolidate all of their facilities’ BIM models, including the new terminal expansion. An infographic at AU25 for the Vision 100 project noted that nearly 500 RVT models were utilized for the project. Brendon Dillon says that airports are laboratories for testing the latest digital technologies due to their size and complexity. The Vision 100 project story is also told via this video interview here.

AI Takes the Mic in Nashville

It would be an understatement to say AI stole the show in Nashville this September. Autodesk is making massive claims about the potential productivity gains that can come via AI. But this wasn’t all talk and those in attendance witnessed both Autodesk Assistant (aka: AA), a text-prompt-based tool shown working inside Autodesk Revit and other tools, as well as the even bigger news about the new Neural CAD engines, which are also called AI foundation models.

A critical piece of the AI revolution are MCP Servers and they are dynamic drivers of the AI revolution. Their emergence in 2024 are a milestone for AI technologies. We discuss them in detail below.

We have broken down the Neural CAD engines in another report but the takeaway is this: traditional CAD engines are being programmatically altered so that an AI layer can generatively produce 3D CAD model data that can be edited later by common human CAD interactions.

MORE: AU25: All about Autodesk’s AI Neural CAD Engines

When I asked Autodesk staff if the Neural CAD engines were entirely new versus utilizing a next evolution of their own proprietary geometric modeling kernel, ShapeManager, which was originally forked from the ACIS kernel back in 2001, they didn’t quite answer me in the clearest of terms, but what was clear is that after generative-AI based model generation, these models were further editable inside Autodesk’s other existing tools—Fusion and Forma or Revit. To be more explicit. Via text prompt, the neural CAD engine generates 3D objects in the form of a boundary representation (BREP) geometry and this can be edited within Fusion. A similar thing is happening in Forma Building Designer but it is not a BREP. (see below)

All these generative AI models were produced using Autodesk’s new Neural CAD engines. Via text prompts, various 3D models can be generated by the new neural CAD engines and the resultant models are fully editable in Autodesk Fusion, the company’s leading cloud-based CAD tool for design and manufacturing (D&M) customers. (Image: Architosh).

In my test experience on the show floor, the neural CAD engine for geometry generated a series of electric toothbrushes. All of this from a text prompt, but the neural CAD engines can also understand hand drawings and photos.

With neural CAD for buildings, the text prompts are communicating to an AI foundation model that has been trained on building design and thus understands things like corridors, rooms, walls, doors, windows and so forth. It also understands spatial and physical relationships and structural systems. So you can tell Forma Building Design to create an all concrete design or a steel one or some other system.

A conceptual demo of the advanced agentic AI that Autodesk is imagining and developing for the future of AEC professionals, as shown at AU25 in Nashville. They have created key building blocks for this kind of AI workflow. 

The new Building Layout Explorer is the name for the neural CAD engine technologies powering the upcoming Forma Building Design. In a media only session on the show floor, we were able to see the AI engine generate a single-loaded corridor design and then the user can lock down specific aspects of the generative design while iterating more with the AI agent.

MCP Servers

Autodesk noted that MCP servers are taking AI to the next level. MCP refers to Model Context Protocol and the AI technology is developed and open-sourced by Anthropic and is being touted as an industry AI standard. This technology enables AI agents and large language models (LLMs) to connect with external software tools (apps via APIs), data sources, and services.

Autodesk Assistant is Agentic AI in action. “AA,” as it is called, can surface your data without being prompted and provide predictive insights. It can also automate repetitive tasks in tools like Revit shown here. (Image: Autodesk)

Some have said that MCP is the “USB-C port for AI” meaning it connects to things that can have real-time data in them. Unlike earlier ChatGPT type AI chatbots, MCP servers enable AI agents to access real-world context and capabilities and not just a static set of training data, like in the earlier versions of ChatGPT.

MORE: Introducing the Model Context Protocol

The capabilities can include the ability to control and execute software functions in existing software solutions. This has been recently demonstrated by other AEC software companies. Model Context Protocol is about communication and frees up AI agents from being trapped behind static training data. In the case of Autodesk Assistant (AA), via Autodesk’s MCP servers, AA will have access to other third party AI agents, APIs from Autodesk apps, data lakes (data sources), and services.

The API Story

Amy Bunszel said in our smaller AEC media meeting that API calls were already up 43 percent from a year ago and this is all before these new Autodesk MCP servers are available to their users. What Bunszel was getting at in our private meeting was the fact that data exchange connectors “between Autodesk products and non-Autodesk products are in high demand.”

Autodesk believes that interoperability and automation are crucial for Autodesk’s AI future vision. “Interop is the backbone” the company says and work should flow fluidly with no wasted hours or difficult hand-offs. That’s easier said than done, and today construction pros lose up to six (6) hours per week due to this. Autodesk execs said that “to fix interop we need to fix data before we even get to AI.”

Geometry Mapping

Bunszel thus laid out the mandate of what the company and the industry need to do. They need to fix data first to optimally address interoperability. Native geometry mapping is a crucial step so that geometry model data from different applications to move between applications, including third-party applications outside of Autodesk’s many tools. This is so critical that even big customers like Ramboll, for example, is one such large global engineering company writing their own geometry mapping APIs to move model data between various software tools from different vendors.

The Cost of Advanced AI

With demand for better interop and a growing hunger for AI-powered tools in AEC workflows, a natural question that arrises is the cost of token usage for inference. As users begin to embrace tools like Autodesk Forma Building Design and iterate with generative AI, plus tap the power and usefulness of AI agents like Autodesk Assistant (AA), demand for inference will skyrocket at AI data centers. So how is this cost going to be accounted for?

Readers need to understand that we are only in the nascent stages of the AI industrial revolution. Specifically, the way computer users today work with AI tools is mostly with AI agents like Google’s Gemini (widely used now as part of Google search, and Chatbot tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude or Perplexity.AI. These tools plus visual AI tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion and onward with more specific AI image generators like Chaos Veras and Nemetschek’s AI Visualizer represent the bottom tier of the AI era pyramid. What comes next is Autodesk largely showcased at AU25 in Nashville, with its Neural CAD engines running new tools like Forma Building Design which represents the next level up with spatial and physical reasoning and some basic industry-specific reasoning. (Image: Architosh)

Amy Bunszel said the company’s subscription-based software licensing models will need to be augmented with usage-based licensing models. That sounds simple in theory but every software vendor in the market (not just the AEC market) who brings generative and agentic AI tools into powerful utilization will see customers thirst for such capabilities skyrocket. If the AI workflows are as transformative as witnessed at AU25, wouldn’t customers adopt and embrace them at accelerating rates?

The good news is Autodesk and the rest of the AEC/O market have time to figure this question out. AI features will be rolled out slowly and at varying rates depending on the specifics of that AI technology. The big takeaway from AU25 in Nashville isn’t just that AI took the mic but that we are now seeing actual AI solutions arriving in today’s most popular Autodesk AEC tools.

The post AU25 Mainstage: AI Takes the Mic in Nashville appeared first on Architosh.

Episode 3

Episode 25-03 delves into our annual Architosh BEST of SHOW awards for best digital technologies shown at the annual AIA National Convention and Exposition. Annually we cover the AEC digital pavilion and each year we highlight the products and companies we feel were the most important, innovative, and of high interest in architects attending the show. We award winners and prizes and make a formal announcement and each year that announcement is read by thousands of AEC users worldwide. (read here now).

Episode 3 is long and we know your time is important, so here are the chapters written out for you so you can skip around to just the parts of interest to you. (must open video in YouTube, click YouTube button once playing below.)

Chapters:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 03:36 – List of Winners & Themes
• 13:19 – Areas of Technical Impact
• 19:50 – Award Criteria
• 25:15 – C.Scale
• 28:46 – Polycam
• 34:58 – Twinmaster
• 40:34 – Arcol
• 50:04 – Revizto
• 56:45 – SketchUp
• 1:04:15 – UpCodes
• 1:09:30 – Chaos Envision
• 1:15:36 – D5 for Teams
• 1:18:34 – BIMBeats – CBT Event
• 1:23:22 – Yard-sticking

Important Video Highlights to Not Miss

Some of the big highlights of this video include hearing from Pete Evans, AIA, who was one of the earliest members of the national AIA BIM TAP group and who organized the BIM TAP awards presentations each year at the AIA National Convention. Pete offers important insights about this year’s winners. Additional highlights include all of the following:

• Core Thematic Pillars of Architosh AIA BOS awards (3:36) — we highlight how our merit process is aimed at the health and the core values of the architectural profession
• C.Scale — one of the more interesting solutions at AIA25 Boston this year was a technology solution that exist as a web app and is embedded behind some of the most critical new BIM 2.0 tools by Autodesk, Arcol and Graphisoft. (24.15)
• Twinmaster — a digital twin tool that not just aimed at the post-occupancy phase of AEC/O but the entire lifecycle of a building from its initial conception and beyond. This app features an AI text-prompt as a primary part of its generative user interface. (34:58).
• Arcol — one of the most anticipated new tools to appear this year in AEC/O is one partially funded by a key ex-Autodesk co-CEO in addition to top-tier VCs. Arcol is aimed at competing with Autodesk’s Forma but has an interest in working with a much broader ecosystem. It also has early-stage pricing (cost studies) functionality. (40:34)
• BIMBeats — we discuss the importance of measurement and how it has long been missing in the architectural industry. BIMBeats was not at AIA25 but rather at a special event co-produced by CBT Architects in Boston and the Nemetschek Group. That special event (invite only) was actually one of the highlights of AIA25 Boston this year. BIMBeats is a tool that architect firms must check out, but sadly the industry isn’t naturally aligned toward such approaches. So we at Architosh will continue to focus and help promote this exciting new tool. (1:18:34)
• Yard-sticking — this is a discussion about a chart first produced for Architosh’s Xpresso newsletter in a feature there. This ties into what BIMBeats is doing and the importance of measurement (or lack thereof) in the architecture industry. (1:23:22)

Other ToshTalks to Watch

We are only three episodes into our new ToshTalks series. Here is why you should listen to and watch the others:

• ToshTalks Episode 25-02 — Everyone knows about V-Ray in the architecture world, but Chaos owns more than V-Ray and Enscape. Watch and learn about Chaos’ new Envision platform that is more than visualization but also immersion and future collaboration. We also cover Chaos futures. Gain unique insights into Chaos and its AI strategies.
• ToshTalks Episode 25-01 — This episode discusses Vectorworks futures. This is especially of interest to folks on the Vectorworks platform now, but it should also be of interest to other Nemetschek Group application members and architects, in general, who have been curious about Vectorworks.

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Like all episodes, ToshTalks articles also include some exclusive bits of the conversation found only in writing in this feature below. So please see the PostTalk Exclusive section below.

Episode 2

Episode 25-02 takes on a deep dive with Roderick Bates, Head of Product Operations, Chaos. In this episode, recorded not long after the AIA25 Boston (National Architects Convention) in June, Roderick not just talks but shows some of the exciting new directions Chaos is going with its visualization technology and its ability to visualize data (as in Enscape Impact).

Roderick Bates, Head of Product Operations, Chaos.

Importantly, Bates discusses not just some of the exciting new ways AI technologies will be playing out in Chaos products (including its older products and not just the new products acquired and born out of the AI era), and how these technologies will impact users and their creative workflows.

Importantly, Chaos Envision is also discussed in terms of what the product is and what it offers to the AEC industry as a new kind of visualization platform. Finally, in our PostTalk exclusive, we hear some thoughts from Bates about the Macintosh in the AEC industry. For those who care about platforms or are passionate Mac users, you will want to read that below. (That part is not included in our video recording; it’s exclusive to this feature article.)

PostTalk Exclusive

Topic: Chaos Envision is Hot, Will it Come to the Mac?

“Envision requires NVIDIA RTX technology, and as you know, that is not on the Mac at the moment,” says Bates. “As Anna said at AIA25, bringing Chaos Envision to the Mac is a very doable thing; we just need to see demand for it.”

In talking with Bates about this part of the issue, Chaos Envision is very new, so the take-up on Envision within the larger AEC community is a more pressing issue at the moment, but demand from customers can change things quickly. Still, while doable technically, it would take a lift.

Topic: What Could Help?

Besides the demand for a Mac version, what could help is extra resources. “It’s not something that is simple,” says Bates. “And at the end of the day, it would be another mouth to feed.” Yet Bates noted that Apple offered to help Chaos bring it over to Apple Metal (Apple’s graphics API). Is a port version of Enscape on Metal possible? Absolutely. Will it happen in the near future? It is too early to tell.

Topic: Chaos has Competition

Bates noted that while Mac versions of things are nice to have, the competitive pressure on Chaos—who happens to be the AEC industry leader in visualization—is significant, and the company needs to keep innovating. “The competition is moving quickly,” he says, “We are squeezed on one end by a lot of people realizing that real-time visualization is the future—people are now really getting it, and everyone is coming out with their flavor of it. And then on the other end, AI is coming from the other side. And finally, we have seen 28 out of the past 29 months of declining billings in architectural offices (see AIA data). So that’s three directions, and all we can do is keep moving forward.”

One takeaway from this is that while there is growing Mac demand in the market, against a backdrop of competitive pressures, having the Mac version isn’t as big a competitive advantage (though, again, that too is something that must be monitored because Mac usage is growing in AEC.

Topic: Growing Mac Usage in AEC

Despite this matrix of forces that help determine development budgets and focuses, Chaos does see a growing Mac market share in architecture globally. “It doesn’t mean the Mac users aren’t out there,” he adds. “And some platforms serving the Mac are really growing a lot, like SketchUp. It’s year-over-year growth, which is crazy for an established modeling platform. It’s really solid.”

“At the same time we are also seeing a lot of strong growth in the market with Archicad and also Vectorworks,” Bates says, noting that because their rendering software V-Ray and Enscape and other tools work with many if not most of the authoring tools out there, Chaos’s engagement with customers, new customers and downloads of its tools give it KPIs that enable it to take a kind of temperature on what tools authoring tools are growing by which rates.

While noting the growth they see with Archicad and Vectorworks, he says that many people are looking for alternatives to Revit, which has the dominant market share in the United States. “Particularly for smaller projects,” he adds. “And we are seeing more and more people doing things like high-end residential and seeing that CAD doesn’t cut it anymore, especially if you want to have visualization workflows.”

Topic: Growth in Visualization is Putting Pressure on Design Professionals

“I think part of what we are seeing too is that the economic pressures and competition in the architecture industry is putting pressure on the design professionals to up their game to win the work, to make the clients happy, and to simply perform at a higher level,” says Bates. “You really have to stay competitive. Somebody is going to win the work. Someone has to win.”

[Editor’s Note:  Article edited 2:20 pm ETD, 15 August 2025].

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These include world-famous architects and engineering consultancies, such as the United Kingdom’s Foster & Partners, Grimshaw, and Atkins, as well as the US-based Jacobs. Top global general contractors like Skanska, Balfour Beatty, and Vinci Construction are also prominent Revizto users, and then there are owners like Siemens and the pharmaceutical giant Roche who are also enthusiastic Revizto users.

Revizto and Beginnings

Revizto’s tagline is “unifying BIM intelligence across 2D and 3D,” and it is an apt one for this cloud-based real-time BIM coordination, clash detection, and issue tracking software platform, especially since one of its unique features is the ability to easily enable users to view 2D drawings integrated into 3D BIM model views.

Such views help users fully understand a building, as the 2D drawings ensure that part of the documentation set is reflective of the 3D BIM model. Meanwhile, the model provides spatial context, allowing users to relate to the drawings and gain a simultaneous understanding of the building’s spatial and orthographic aspects. It’s like 2D plus 3D equals a kind of xD perception of a building design.

CEO Arman Gukasyan tells me that this perception is all part of what makes Revizto special to use and aligns with its ethos of ease of use and power. Gukasyan, whose background is not in AEC, first got the idea for Revizto while working as part of another startup where 3D gaming technology was married to GIS technology for 3D mapping of cities in Europe.

“When I saw the inefficiency in city planning, this is when I got this idea to bring this kind of technology to AEC,” he says. He left that earlier company in 2007 and began to envision what is today Revizto.

What Revizto looks like across various device types, from computers to tablets to smartphones. See more detailed interfaces of the dominant field device in US construction today — the Apple iPhone!

Learning early on that there is upwards of 20 percent waste in the construction industry alone, Gukasyan was nonplused. “When you ask a GC for a price on a one hundred million dollar building, they have already budgeted into that price around 20 percent of waste,” he says. “This just blew my mind.”

“That sort of triggered me into starting this business,” he adds. “I wondered, ‘how do we bring all this data from tools like Revit and SketchUp and bring this data to all stakeholders so people see the same thing and make the right decisions?’ This was like the whole thing to me.”

Gaming and Ease of Use

So why start with building Revizto with gaming technology? Was it a faster way to develop, saving millions of lines of code? Actually, that is not the major reason but a partial reason.

“The reason is that gaming technology could actually consume heavy data on the one hand and be very simple and interactive to use on the other hand,” he continues, “so anybody in the project can actually consume and leverage that data.”

Revizto supports QR codes that can synchronize with issues and locations in the BIM model.

Revizto utilizes only about seven percent of the Unity game engine. “We have built seven million lines of code on top of that game engine,” he adds. What they really leverage in Unity is more than just the 3D environment and its capabilities, but the fact that developing with Unity enables them to easily take Revizto cross-platform to many operating systems and types of devices. From this perspective, Revizto leverages the inherent advantages of what we refer to as the BIM 2.0 era tech stack.

Revizto is a cloud-era app, but not a cloud-first one. Core Revizto functionality is available through its native desktop and mobile apps, while its Web-based issue tracker is accessible from any modern browser on a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. The native app runs on Mac and Windows desktops, as well as iOS and Android tablets and smartphones.

Unique Power

Leveraging Unity means having an advanced 3D technology that can crunch down 3D models from all kinds of CAD industry modeling kernels and create light-weight, high-fidelity, accurate model equivalents inside Revizto.

“We have huge enterprise clients doing massive giga projects in the Middle East, and they are running on Revizto very well because we know how to minimize all those polys,” says Gukasyan. “We are the only platform that can handle that amount of data, and we have consumed over 280 terabytes of project data to date,” he adds.

Extreme Power in Open BIM Tool

With the capacity to scale from small BIM projects to the world’s largest infrastructure and building projects, the next factor that makes Revizto truly special is its openness. “We are OpenBIM oriented,” says Gukasyan, adding, “we want to work with everyone.”

“When we say we are OpenBIM, we are saying we are platform agnostic. We have developed for all the authoring tools out there worldwide, from Autodesk, Bentley, Nemetschek, and Trimble, both plugins for their tools and direct imports,” he adds.

Gukasyan says that regardless of the authoring tools an architect or engineer uses, Revizto can bring all of that into one interactive, real-time, collaborative platform. In some sense, Revizto is making up for the failures of buildingSMART’s IFC format as a de facto open industry standard.

When asked about IFC and its importance in the industry and its relevance to Revitzo, Gukasyan doesn’t mince words. “The short answer is that in the United States, IFC didn’t fly and it is not flying still.” He admits, though, that in the UK, Germany, and the Nordics, the IFC standard is “a little bit of a standard.”

“In many of those countries, the owner contracts say that the owner is to get a deliverable in IFC,” he notes, acknowledging that in the United States, in particular, owners often demand a deliverable in Revit, a closed BIM lingua franca format used extensively between US architects and MEP and structural engineers.

Closed — An American Problem

“I will tell you, Anthony, that one of the key challenges in the US market is that some of the dominant players still keep their formats closed,” says Gukasyan. “They want everyone to be on their platforms only, but I will tell you, Anthony, that the [AEC] market is so large and diverse that no single company can chew this market fully.”

Revizto on a smartphone showing issues, assignments, and the status of each issue.

So, in other words, any attempt to swallow the entire market only leads to a type of figurative and literal choking. I remind him that we clarified this in our coverage of the Revit Open Letters, and that Autodesk and Nemetschek recently signed a shared open API agreement, from which no further announcement has been made.

“Anthony, it is one thing to say you want to be open, and then it is another to say it with your actions,” he continues. “There’s still work to be done across the industry to move toward greater openness and interoperability.”

Another view of Revizto on the smartphone.

Gukasyan further insists that no one tool can serve all the different types of specialties in the building industry. “One tool that can do all your project types truly well doesn’t really exist; that is why if you are opening up your formats, you are making life easier for your users.”

“This is what we are trying to do,” he adds. “Whether your sub-contractor is using a Nemetschek product or a Bentley product and your architect is using Revit, Revizto can consume all of those formats, get them aligned simply, and then enable full BIM integration and coordination into one single platform.”

Open — A Global Success

Revizto’s openness is central to its global success. It works with everyone, typically through dedicated plugins for those authoring apps. This includes Autodesk Revit, Trimble’s massively popular SketchUp, the popular Rhino 3D advanced modeling software, and all rival Bentley and Nemetschek BIM authoring platforms, especially Archicad and Vectorworks Architect.

This openBIM orientation is why global architects using a variety of authoring tools should themselves engage with and utilize Revizto. In the United States (and also globally), Arman Gukasyan says SketchUp is massively used, mostly in projects over 30 million USD. With such large projects, interior designers benefit from the coordination strengths of Revizto.

However, the bulk of Revizto’s users are general contractors. “60 percent of our core customers are GCs,” he notes. That means 40 percent are users, split between large owners, engineers, architects, interior designers, and other specialists.

Some of these other specialists are FM professionals. “During Covid, many airports digitized their facilities when they were closed or partially closed,” he adds. “We see these airport customers inside Revizto now and using it for FM (facilities management),” he added. “They can use it to do their QA and QC in Revizto.”

Filling the Critical Gap in the Market

Part of the success of Revizto stems from focusing on the core problem. And what is that problem the industry needs so badly?

The answer: Delivering a single-source-of-truth (SSOT) federated BIM coordination platform that works with everyone.

Revizto’s killer feature for some is its ability to coordinate and overlay drawings with models in section and plan sections.

When coordinating BIM models from engineers and architects who all use best-of-breed solutions from different software providers across various formats, simply bringing all those elements together is virtually non-existent in the global AEC world. Gukasyan addressed this need in the vacuum created by an industry of major players focused on bringing users onto their platform.

The Autodesk – Nemetschek API agreement was actually an acknowledgement that this approach is a failure. (see, Architosh, “Autodesk and Nemetschek Group Partner on Interoperability,” 24 April 2024). Nicolas Mangon, Autodesk Vice President of AEC Strategy, told Architosh that “Today the technology landscape is complex and there are lots of tools from both Autodesk and Nemetschek, plus the many startups which you know very well.”

While the intention is in the right direction, the API sharing agreement doesn’t change the nature of the solutions Autodesk and Nemetschek offer to the market. At present, neither offers a direct comparable solution. The problem, as stated above, requires genuine openness, a wide-ranging approach to making all tools and users feel welcome, the capacity to support the largest models possible, and, of course, focus.

While Autodesk has its ACC and its Navisworks, Gukasyan says Revizto is singularly committed to collaboration. “We are focused on the collaboration industry, not the authoring industry, not the MCAD, nor movie industry tools,” he says.

Focus is King & Different

Gukasyan notes that in the US, especially, the market is served by a massive generalist. And largely, this generalist is excelling in the market vis-à-vis the economics of network effects.

This comes at a cost, and one of those is that the United States is far from being the most advanced nation in BIM users. “Countries like Germany, the UK, and the Nordics are much more advanced BIM users than the USA,” says Gukasyan. When I ask him how he knows this and to provide specifics, he notes that 30 percent of Revizto users are in Europe and the Middle East, 30 percent are in the APAC region, and 40 percent are in the Americas (north and south).

“One advantage we have is that we have larger users everywhere around the globe, and we are capturing their expertise and bringing that wisdom to our other users globally. Our teams work with and see global practices in action. And, Anthony, I can tell you that, in terms of the most advanced BIM workflows and processes, Australia and New Zealand are far ahead. They have the most advanced processes and automate everything.”

Closing Comments

Readers new to Revizto may have unanswered questions that my chat with Arman Gukasyan actually addressed. One question is, who is the nearest competitor to Revizto if Autodesk is not?

Gukasyan emphasized several times that Revizto is not a CDE (common data environment), so it is not competing with tools like Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC), Aconex, or Trimble Connect. At the same time, what makes Revizto unique isn’t just its openness combined with far more power to handle large models; Revizto’s philosophy is centered on coordination and collaboration, and hence works to avoid building system clashes from the outset.

How BIM models and site photography can interact inside Revizto.

Yes, Revizto also features advanced clash detection for modeling coordination checking. However, its ability to federate every kind of model input and provide a best-in-breed Issue Manager, as well as a best-in-breed 2D/3D hybrid viewer, means that systems are coordinated better earlier, resulting in fewer clashes being found.

Readers may also be wondering about model checking, like Solibri. Revizto isn’t focused on model checking either. And what about this giga-BIM model viewing boast? Yes, it is true that Dalux also boasts its ability to handle massive federated BIM models.

“If you speak with Dalux, they don’t view us [Revizto] as a competitor,” says Gukasyan. “Why is that? Because they primarily sell their Common Data Environment (CDE), and their BIM Viewer is free with the CDE. While Dalux is similar to us, our focus is on collaboration and coordination.”

“If you’re talking about an integrated collaboration platform—and we are talking about an agnostic platform and agnostic perspective—any model into Revizto and then enabling a simple, fast, BIM coordination platform for all your project members. This is where our solution is and where we are deepening even more.”

Editors Notes

Revizto is sold to different AEC/O stakeholders through unique packages for their needs. For general contractors and large owners, a single license enables an unlimited number of users and project-based pricing.

For architects, engineers, and interior designers, who are the primary license holders, packages focus on model-based pricing. Revizto offers much discounted pricing for architects and engineers using it alone, while architects and engineers end up using it for free as part of projects where the owner or general contractor is providing access to Revizto-based projects.

The post Inside Revizto: Global Dominance with Open BIM Coordination appeared first on Architosh.

The Importance of Truth

In the case of Buttigieg’s remark about moving forward, he stated that we are operating in a post-truth, politically divided world, and in this world, facts and objective truth matter even more. His comment “it’s really important that in the tug-of-war and the push-and-pull of politics, the fighting at least be over something that is actually real,” drew appreciative applause from the AIA audience, as he ended: “I always say if I’m going to get beat up over something, I at least want to get beat up over something that is true.”

Buttigieg’s comment addressed data, and especially open data, used to address real policy decision-making in urban and rural communities, but it hits hard truths when it comes to forward momentum in society on topics such as energy, climate, resilience, and artificial intelligence. All these topics overlap in both a political context and a digital technology and software applications context.

Technology Truths

The industry at this moment is coming to grips with a potential velocity of change it has never seen before. After more than a decade of settling into specific technology solutions and workflows, firms and architects are facing potential disruption, especially from artificial intelligence (AI). But not all firms are truly grasping the importance of this moment in history, and the vast majority are looking at their technology stack largely the same as in recent years, based on recent successes.

Pete Buttigieg’s keynote talk at AIA 2025 Boston highlighted notions of data, society, facts, and truth.

This phenomenon is not unique to AEC/O and it is similar to what is known in the equities investment community as “anchoring bias,” referring to the mistake investors make in holding specific equities in their portfolios too long, specifically because they were excellent performers in the recent past. That is exactly the place history is finding the AEC industry with its digital tools. New AI technologies are going to diffuse themselves into tools and workflows, and some of these disruptions will make older tools more or less special, while new tools will become must-have digital equipment potentially displacing older tools and certainly altering future workflows.

Selecting digital tool stacks in AEC firms is exactly like dropping an anchor, and there are few firms in the world that are like Boston’s CBT Architects, who maintain a structured approach to objectively re-evaluating their digital tool stack on a regular basis (more on the CBT+Nemetschek event in another article). The firm is a model architectural organization in the United States for its disciplined and methodological approach to digital practice, which includes structured evaluations of a constant stream of new digital tools, many with AI overtones.

But the hard truth about digital technology change in AEC isn’t just about AI and machine learning. AI largely joins a chorus of ‘change vectors’ impacting or disrupting common assumptions about the evolution of BIM (Building Information Modeling). So AI is just one vector of three we see as critical.

MORE: Autodesk Begins New Era for Future of Architecture

These three change vectors we see as critical include, firstly, AI (artificial intelligence), secondly, the emergence of BIM 2.0 tools that for the most part are addressing the front-end of the design process and pre-design, and thirdly, from the maturing state of BIM itself (which correlates with many things including how desktop era tools can make the leap to cloud-era tools, how tools built for one OS and one microchip architecture can make the leap to multi-platform architectures, and how BIM authoring platforms interrelate to digital twins and the group of BIM 2.0 tools.)

One: Artificial Intelligence

AI is by far the most disruptive technology on the horizon. It is both here in early forms and out on the horizon in vastly more powerful and disruptive forms. Inside the Nemetschek Group booth at AIA Boston we heard from Julian Geiger, VP Head of AI at the Nemetschek Group, about all the aspects of a new generation of artificial intelligence, including AI agents that can do complex reasoning and agent to agent interactions. (see, Architosh: “Nemetschek Begins 2025 Strong — Tech Trends and AI Assistant,” 3 Feb 2025)

Julian Geiger, VP and head of AI at Nemetschek Group gave an interesting talk on where AI is going in the AEC industry.

Geiger referenced the important fact that 41 percent of AEC workers will retire by 2031. When hearing that the first thought that comes to mind is knowledge drain, but here AI tools may become a big part of the knowledge retention and diffusion story. The other pressing aspect of this retiring percentage is human-power. Who will replace these exiting workers?

Looking at the slide shown (above) from the Nemetschek booth talk, the use of AI multimodality work change may enable the smaller remaining human workforce in AEC to do much more than they could in the pre-AI era. The overall takeaway point by the Geiger talk is that AI in AEC is much more than just a visualization or image-generator. AI technologies will penetrate our existing tools and make them more productive for us, while helping to create entirely new software stacks.

And with this landscape of changing digital tools—and a large swath of new AI tools—the architectural professional and firm should learn to become systematically and critically evaluative. New tools are popping up all around us, especially those targeting the pre-design and early design phases where traditional BIM solutions are weak.

Two: BIM 2.0

BIM 2.0 technologies are recognized as the next evolution of BIM, moving away from foundational capabilities in BIM (eg: automatic drawings from 3D models) to more advanced capabilities grounded in new larger technology foundations. Whereas BIM 1.0 technologies were individualistic and bound to file-based desktop computing, BIM 2.0 technologies are built around real-time collaboration and are API-based cloud- computing.

BIM 2.0 technologies also address new advanced technologies such as machine-learning (ML) and AI, as well as simulation and computationally intensive integrations. However, the central defining difference is that BIM 2.0 technologies are cloud-native and run through either modern web browsers or in-app web windows or lean-clients with a mixture of cloud and edge compute resources being tapped to run the software. Arcol was at AIA25 Boston and they were one of the highlight digital technology booths at the show with a compelling first version available to the profession (more on Arcol in another report).

Arcol is one of the most exciting new BIM 2.0 tools and meets all the essential criteria of a BIM 2.0 tool. The cloud-first, mulit-user, early-stage BIM solution runs in a modern browser and helps architects and planners evaluate site and plan buildings faster, among many other key features including various analyses including cost.

The growing list of BIM 2.0 solutions shown at AIA25 Boston is noteworthy in progress and precision of focus to pain-points in the existing workflows led by traditional BIM software. We will dive deep into these solutions in our upcoming AIA25 Boston reports.

Three: BIM Unmet

When it comes to Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a process the process itself presents itself in two forms. There is “closed BIM” and there is “open BIM.” The leader of the closed BIM world is Autodesk with its ubiquitous Revit platform and strong third-party ecosystem. Then there is everybody else in the industry with their open BIM mantra and approach and largely led by global giant Nemetschek Group.

So let’s discuss briefly the unmet promises of BIM by attacking the most obvious issue first.

BIM promised us automatic drawings from 3D models and better design than 2D CAD processes. The problem is tools like Revit cannot easily or at all allow for the complete design modeling flexibility architects actually want and need. BIM tools are neither easy and fast for early conceptual design nor robust enough for complex formal exploration. Hence, the world’s most famous formalist architect of the past 50 years, Frank Gehry, famously created their own technology stack from the bones of CATIA. For all others who could not take that path, Rhinoceros and Grasshopper largely met the unmet needs of BIM with much more capable 3D modeling. And at the opposite side of the spectrum Trimble’s SketchUp helps architects and architectural students quickly formulate design concepts in 3D without the unneeded baggage of thinking of architecture in terms of BIM object types and creating objects through complex dialog boxes.

All of this can be broken down by saying that the parametric nature of 3D modeling in BIM comes with serious limitations that Sketchup, Rhino and Grasshopper address at various levels of freedom and computation capacity. And it is not just Revit that bears this limitation, all of its BIM authoring competitors for the most part suffer the same kind of limitation. Fluid and easy design modeling — and by saying “easy” I mean very flat learning curve — really largely remains in one vendor’s solution and that is Trimble’s SketchUp with its massive ecosystem of add-ons and library of objects. What the BIMs should be doing is robustly partnering with Trimble rather than aimlessly trying to compete with them or stymie their efforts.

And finally, another problem with the maturing BIM landscape is that these tools are technology-constrained. Autodesk Revit (and Bentley’s solutions too) is technology-constrained to Microsoft Windows and specifically the version bound to X86 chip architecture from AMD and struggling Intel. And all of the exiting BIM solutions are technology constrained to the desktop paradigm.

The future winner in BIM will not be limited and bound by these 1990’s technology constraints. And the present leader (Revit) has always told us that addressing the constraint around Windows was mostly about the large lift required to recode the BIM platform for multi-operating systems and chip architectures. This excuse is growing weak as Apple’s chips continue to put distance between them and the rest of the field (honestly, leaving the X86 field in the dust) and countless large tech companies speak of using AI automation rather than humans to produce millions of lines of code.

Closing Comments

As we review the digital technologies shown at AIA Boston 2025, we will pay special attention to these technology truths as they offer the AEC industry at large a new clean sheet approach to solving problems that traditional technologies today cannot. Stay with us over the next days and weeks as we unpack a large roster of interesting digital technologies and solutions.

The post AIA25: AI Ushers In ‘Clean Sheet’ Change in AEC appeared first on Architosh.

However, that is okay for now because Chaos is focused on the “design workflow” space.

Design Workflow Space

When the two companies merged back in 2022 with the help of venture capital firms TA Associates (in America) and LEA Partners (in Germany), Stefan Dandle, principal of TA, stated that “together, we believe the company can build on its strong momentum to create a global leader in the 3D visualization and design workflow space.”

The “design workflow” side of the market (referred to as “space” in the quote above) is one of the fastest areas of change in the larger AEC software industry as AEC professionals, especially architects, take on the use of many more software tools with increasing specialties. Roderick Bates of Chaos, who is Head of Product Operations, refers to this as “unbundling the [design] process into more discreet tools.”

Chaos’ new Envision aims to dramatically simplify and broaden the capabilities of those who design built environments and aim to communicate their visions. This includes new capacity to simulate environments and not just render what they look like. People, vehicles, and other types of objects can be made to move in life-like ways.

Chaos is mainly known as a maker of rendering software programs—especially its famous V-Ray renderer and now Enscape. However, its first software tool addressing what the company calls the “design track” is about helping architects manage energy usage in architecture.

The Second Screen Phenomenon

“It’s our first new product that is outside the realm of visualization,” adds Bates, who further adds, “After talking to our customers and asking them ‘why do you use Enscape?’ they would say ‘I’m using it because it is kind of like this second screen when I am using Revit or what-have-you and I get to have this new view [of the building] at the same time.’ “

It was that kind of comment that partly generated the idea that a rendering software company could also play a larger role in the creation of software that would act as a sort of “design companion.” For Enscape users, Bates said, “their use of the software wasn’t centered principally on the final render, though for many users that is the case, but rather as this design companion view. We began to think about what other kinds of information would be nice for people to have right at their fingertips.”

Enscape Impact is the first kind of workflow space product where an issue in the design workflow confronting owners and their architects is how to design buildings that cost less energy to run. As Architosh has covered in detail in the past, Enscape Impact is a building performance add-on to the regular version of Enscape, which is itself a rendering plugin for AEC industry design authoring tools.

MORE:  Q&A with Chaos Enscape—Improving the Design Workflow

What Enscape Impact does is visualize building energy performance. “What you are talking about here is something that is analysis, and sure, it could have been done another way,“ says Bates. “It could be just a number, a bar chart, or something communicated verbally, but now you are seeing it in a way that is integrated into the model itself.”

“In this case, we are doing something that AI isn’t doing yet,“ he adds.

Validity for Energy Design

Bates, who is the original author of Tally, a life cycle assessment (LCA) program developed by architecture firm Kieran Timberlake, says, at first, folks they approached about the idea of Enscape Impact thought they were oversimplifying what is really going on with energy analysis. “People would say, ‘You need a ton of data in order to get actionable outputs.'”

It turns out that one of the few companies that produces energy analysis engine software loved the idea. “When we approached IES, they were like, ‘I think we can do this.‘ They were, ironically, the last people we thought would like the idea of Impact, but they did. Part of the reason for that was that their software tools were quite complex for architects, and they were just completely cut out of the day-to-day architectural design space,” he adds.

An image of Enscape Impact showing how architects can visualize energy design in architecture. The software helps architects and designers understand the impact of their design on the energy consumption side of architecture.

Enscape Impact gives them access to the architects without cannibalizing their own tools made for engineers and energy consultants. “We also knew that to make this work, we needed to make energy analysis just as accessible as visualization in Enscape.”

Impact uses the same Apache energy analysis engine as IES software solutions. Rather than tons of data inputs like in IES software, in Enscape Impact, the user provides the geometry, the room type, the building’s location, the building’s purpose, and what year it was built or renovated. From there, Impact selects the appropriate template from thousands of IES templates in its database and runs the data behind the scenes.

“So based on all that,“ says Bates, “the template says for this geometry, and this orientation, this is what a code-compliant building would be. So again, the number of inputs is small, but we end up with an output that is surprisingly accurate.”

MORE: Chaos launches Envision: Immersive presentations for architects

In fact, Impact is within two percent of the accuracy of the IES software itself. If the design changes, the energy analysis results are redone, and when this happens, the new results are within 1.5% different than IES. “So now we know what the impacts are, and we can make strong judgments about design changes,“ says Bates, which is what the whole software is about.

Enscape Impact is about evaluating building performance impacts via design iterations and changes.

Design Track Specialties

When thinking about AEC software, Chaos has moved away from thinking about traditional tools that handle just one thing, be that modeling, CAD, BIM, or rendering. In analyzing challenges confronting design workflows, new ideas for software come into focus, even if that kind of software already exists today as its own software island.

That’s just the point: de-siloing the software sector in AEC means being able to move data around between various tools in the design workflow space.

Enscape Impact will begin the research phase for new features such as daylight analysis later this year, says Bates. The company will likely use the Radiance daylight engine and may also include the V-Ray engine. “Customers we spoke to about this want Radiance, but initially we wanted to use V-Ray because of speed,“ he says. V-Ray is about 3x faster.

Daylight analysis is another data set that aids the architect in data-driven design workflows. Bates says they are currently developing human comfort, which is already partially subsumed in Impact’s energy analysis but would be further clarified more broadly with the inclusion of criteria like daylight analysis.

Where Chaos is Going

In thinking about the workflow space and how many different kinds of data could be visualized or communicated in that “second window,” I had to ask the question, Where is Chaos going?

“From our perspective, we want Chaos to be able to deliver the full spectrum design toolkit for AEC,“ says Bates.

Enscape + Veras together in this image (left to right), showing how Veras provides AI technology to the visualization process. Chaos continues to expand its product portfolio through strategic acquisitions. (see next section in article below).

“Right now, we have a big plan for the “A,” and we essentially have almost no play in the “E“ and “C.“ That is not to say Chaos doesn’t have engineers and construction professionals as customers—they do. “We have worked really hard in Enscape to identify core workflow challenges faced by architects, and then address them with software solutions, and our intent is to do the same thing across the full AEC continuum.“

Acquisitions and Expansion

With that mission clarified, Chaos is aiming for larger things, and one pathway to reaching targets is through strategic acquisitions. The latest one is EvolveLAB, a US-based developer of AI-powered tools for architectural design, which was announced this February.

In 2023, the company bought AXYZ for its popular Anima software for human simulation in architectural rendered animations. It then recently added vehicle and traffic simulation to that product.

Not strictly an AEC software company, Chaos also provides software in the DCC (digital content creation) market or its subsector media & entertainment (M&E), where tools like Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya play large roles, along with tools like Maxon’s Cinema 4D.

V-Ray, its flagship high-end renderer, is just such a product, but the company also has Chaos Phoenix for smoke, fire, and fluid special effects in both Max and Maya. And its Chaos Arena is the first-ever real-time path-tracing solution for in-camera visual effects on virtual production stages.

However, returning to the AEC industry, Chaos’ next big gambit is Envision, a 3D scene assembly,  real-time animation, and storytelling software for visualization professionals. With Envision, projects can start in either Enscape (fully accessible to most architects) or V-Ray (the dominant tool for professional ArchViz pros), as well as by using one of the free Chaos VR scene file exporters, all of which feed directly into Envision. Additional file formats will be supported soon, including FBX, OBJ, and USD.

Anima integration is part of Envision and contributes significantly to Envision’s storytelling and movie-making animations. Any object can be moved along a spline path, so trains, trams, or bicycles are all good examples of things that can move in an architectural animation. Objects themselves can have multiple positions in a scene linked to specific segments of an animation’s timeline.

Chaos’s grand vision works by leveraging its internal VR scene format. This enables its various software applications to talk to each other by passing their data between apps—like between Enscape and Envision—via the VR scene file format.

Another sample image from the exciting new Chaos Envision product. More details about the new Envision can be found here.

While OpenUSD continues to gain momentum, Roderick Bates says the VR scene file format has more capabilities for what they want to do in the world of visualization. “I think we will need to play nice with OpenUSD in the future,“ he adds, “especially since I am hearing from multiple sources that OpenUSD is being asked to carry BIM data in it in the future. And once that happens, then that may become more of a universal standard in the industry.“

Still, Bates says it will never have the nuanced data that Chaos’ tools have for high-end visualization. “VR scene file format is really remarkable,“ he says.

Closing Thoughts

Tapping into its strength as a visualization software company, Bates asks the rhetorical question about architecture and its communication needs. What is the best way to communicate data or information?

When thinking about larger architectural workflows, the market is ripe with opportunities to expand the ability to bring data to life via graphic communication. That’s the answer to Bates’ question. A good example is the Revit Graphic Override feature defined by Revit filters. This support in Enscape ensures that data filters in Revit transmit their color values to Enscape as well, so Revit models gain higher-end visual quality via Enscape’s renderer while also deploying the Revit Graphic Overrides communication.

And Enscape even supports up to six section planes by supporting Vectorworks’s unique Clip Cubes technology, giving Vectorworks-based architects uniquely complex sectional views fully rendered in Enscape.

In short, Chaos has built powerful flexibility into its rendering engines, VR scene file format, and API-based pipelines and synching technologies, thus opening itself up to various distinguishing features in design authoring programs. But what is really interesting to think about is where Chaos is ultimately headed with its expansion plans and its ability to tie together diverse programs into integrated workflows.

The post How Chaos Has Moved Beyond Just Visualization appeared first on Architosh.

Maxon aims to change all of this.

A Major Front in Real-Time

The way to change the status quo about Maxon’s presence in the AEC market is to go towards the mainstream, accessible real-time rendering market (ART-RM, pronounced Artem) for architecture. This is the market filled with tools like Twinmotion, Lumion, and Enscape. All these tools are relatively easy-to-use, real-time rendering solutions that typical architects can master to achieve very nice results at a reasonable level of time and effort.

“If you look at the Italian market, or the Japanese market, or the German market, there’s a lot of high-end architectural visualization stories being told in Cinema 4D,” says David McGavran, CEO of Maxon. “That’s usually when the architect passes it onto another production house to do something really special. That’s where we tend to come in.”

Maxon’s new real-time rendering technology is based on its acclaimed Redshift Renderer. The company aims to compete head-on with market leaders in real-time AEC rendering including those like Epic and Chaos.

“What we want to do now is build that bridge,” adds McGavran, “go into the architect’s firm directly into their hands,” McGavran adds that over the years, this is what Maxon has been doing with certain acquisitions.

The Redshift Advantage

While Twinmotion uses its famous Unreal Engine for its rendering technology, which is gaming technology, nobody in the industry has pushed for real-time rendering with technology that is more associated with Hollywood-level visual imagery. Perhaps the exception would be Chaos.

“Redshift is currently the fastest GPU render on the market for full production capability, highest fidelity and highest quality,” adds McGavran. “And we want to take that technology, make it faster, and bring it to more customers.”

Through the new plugin for Vectorworks, users will have access to a separate Maxon rendering window that updates in real-time as users move the model or scene around in the Vectorworks viewport. The user can then complete the scene by utilizing the Redshift render objects and materials that ship with the solution. And those materials look fantastic. (see rendering examples in this article).

McGavran adds that architects can still take these new 3D scenes out to Cinema 4D. So if they want to do a lot of still renderings but leave animation to a visualization studio they work with already using Cinema 4D it is as simple as a click of a button.

Maxon acquired Laubwerk for 3D plant assets earlier in the year. Laubwerk has always led the market in astoundingly realistic and versatile digital plant technology. These assets will be combined as part of the new solution first demonstrated in Vectorworks in June.

McGavran notes that an advantage Maxon will have over its AEC rendering rivals is that of continuity across applications, from between design and BIM apps all the way out to the highest-level rendering and animation in Cinema 4D with Redshift render technology. “You don’t have to restart over with you scene,” he says, “not having to go to different sets of assets, different types of materials, and switching from one renderer to another, which is what the industry standard is today.”

“So if you were to use some of the tools on Earth today, you can’t work within the CAD experience and then go to another toolset without having to do some sort of transition, some sort of translation,” he adds. “And Cineware, which is Maxon 3D technology, has been running inside of Vectorworks, Archicad, and Allplan for the better part of 20 years.”

McGavran’s comments are mostly true as the leading rival to the Nemetschek Group is Autodesk. And while Autodesk is no doubt the industry global leader on the design application side of global AEC, and while it too also has its own Hollywood-level rendering technology, that is not the real-time rendering technology deployed inside of leading tools in architecture like Revit. Instead, Autodesk partnered with Epic and its Twinmotion application inside of Revit.

Since Maxon intends on targeting not just Nemetschek Group BIMs but also Trimble’s SketchUp, Autodesk’s Revit and probably McNeel’s Rhino, all eventually, the company is really competing with Chaos with its family of real-time and non-real-time renderer applications. McGavran said unlike Enscape with its attendant rendering window, in Maxon’s solution you can add and edit the scene in the Maxon window or the host design client’s window. “Anything you put in our viewer-renderer window will be stored in the CAD model or BIM model as well,” he adds, “so it will be bi-directional.”

This means you could drag a Maxon solution asset like a tree into the Maxon render-viewer and it would be reflected back in the CAD-BIM scene, “in the correct proxy style that you would expect in Vectorworks,” he adds. With Maxon’s acquisition of Laubwerks it means you drag their higher resolution versions of their trees into the Maxon viewer and the lower resolution version of the tree shows in the Vectorworks window.

Moving to Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D has always been an excellent advanced digital content creation (DCC) software tool but generally too complex for architects to jump directly into. McGavran says there will be a simple button to push out from their Maxon solution directly to Cinema 4D. This would enable visualization studios or dedicated archviz specialists to further advance the project’s renderings and animations. “The advantage is you will be able to continue in Cinema 4D without another transition happening,” adds McGavran, who notes that will be a distinguishing feature of their solution in the market.

In some ways this strategy isn’t just elevating the capabilities of its sister brands in Vectorworks, Archicad, and Allplan, it ultimately provides more market drive to Cinema 4D itself. It is not that Cinema 4D is so advanced that regular architects can’t use it—far from it—it just takes dedicated time in the app. Yet McGavran wants non-Nemetschek brands to experience Maxon technology as well.

“We want to bring out technology to every creator in the world who is creating compelling stories.” So on that note one can expect Maxon to target some of the most popular design tools in architecture rather quickly, including those outside its sister brands. At this point though there are no comments on timelines for Maxon’s overall AEC real-time visualizations strategy.

New Maxon Technology at AIA Boston

Maxon will be showcasing their new real-time rendering plugin-based technology at AIA Boston in early June. Visitors to the Vectorworks booth can see it demoed live.

Learn more here.

The post Maxon aims to bring Hollywood-level rendering to AEC appeared first on Architosh.