BIM & Architecture | SHAPE

Category: AIA26

  • Field Note 02: THREE FIVE ZERO

    Field Note 02: THREE FIVE ZERO

    Montevideo, Uruguay, 2026

    AIA26, 350 Sessions. THREE, FIVE, ZERO. OK that’s fair!

    The AIA26 schedule has nearly 350 sessions across four days. Keynotes, workshops, seminars, tours, open studios, and an expo that could eat an entire afternoon on its own.

    As an International Associate member, I need 18 LUs per year, at least 12 of them HSW. The math says I could cover my full annual CE requirement and still have hundreds of sessions left to ignore.

    I ignored most of them on purpose.

    I run a BIM studio. Modeling, coordination, templates, audits, rendering, VR, the whole stack, for architecture firms in the US and Latin America. This is my first AIA conference. I built my schedule around three questions: What do I need to learn? What helps me have better conversations once I’m there? What am I going to regret skipping?

    Here’s what I landed on:

    Wednesday, June 10 — Land and Get Oriented

    My conference starts before any session does. First-Timers Orientation kicks off at 8:30 AM and I’m going. I read the first-timers guide twice already. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you don’t know how a 20,000-person conference operates. I’ll take the briefing and figure out the layout before I need to sprint between rooms.

    That night: AIA26 Opening Night Party at Bayfront Park. This is the first real signal of the conference: who showed up, what the energy is, what kind of conversations are possible. I want to be in that room from the start, not catching up on day two.

    Thursday, June 11 — Keynote, Two Conflicts, and a Beer Tour With an Architecture Angle

    The opening keynote with Padma Lakshmi sets the tone for the whole week. I want to be in Hall GH for that.

    Then I have a scheduling problem: NextGen Meetup (10:30 AM) and Small Firm Meetup (11:30 AM) overlap. Both are in my schedule. My current plan is to go to both and figure out the physics later. The NextGen Lounge is where the people building the next version of practice are congregating. Small Firm Exchange is where the people running practices under 10 people are. Those are not the same conversations, and I want both of them.

    At 4 PM: Thursday Evening Beer Tasting Tour. This sounds purely social and it mostly is, but the tour description mentions San Diego’s craft brewing scene as a case study in adaptive reuse. I’m not going to pretend that’s why I signed up. But it’s a three-hour walk through the city with fellow architects and a cold beer at each stop. That’s a good way to end a Thursday.

    Friday, June 12 — AI, Small Projects, Service, and the Room I Most Need to Be In

    The anchor of the day is the 9 AM keynote: “Disruptive Transformation: Leveraging AI for Greater Impact and Innovation” with Charlene Li. The title is more direct than most conference programming. The question I want her to answer isn’t whether AI matters in architecture. It’s what the gap looks like between the firms that have started and the ones that haven’t, and whether that gap is still closeable. I expect she’ll be honest about the answer.

    At 10:30 AM: Small Project Design Open Forum, a collaborative session from the AIA Small Project Design Knowledge Community. The focus is on architecture supporting smaller projects and smaller clients. This is closer to the reality of most firms I work with than the trophy projects that dominate conference portfolios. Worth the room.

    At 4 PM: Architalk: Duvall Decker on Design as an Act of Service. Anne Marie and Roy Decker work primarily in rural communities. Their framing, architecture grounded in service, humility, and respect for place, is the opposite of the signature-style thinking that usually fills keynote slots. I’m going because the best conversations about technology in practice almost always happen with people who have a clear reason why the building matters in the first place.

    At 6 PM: International Reception. I’m attending AIA26 as an International Associate from Uruguay. Whether you practice overseas, work internationally, or just think about architecture at that scale, this is the room where those people end up. I’ve been looking forward to this one since I registered.

    Saturday, June 13 — Sustainable Development, Generations, and Practical AI

    The morning keynote: “Architects as Catalysts for Sustainable Development” with Sameh Wahba from The World Bank. The framing is about architecture at an infrastructure scale, the kind of systemic work that shapes cities rather than individual buildings. For anyone thinking about where BIM fits inside a broader development agenda, this is the session that puts the discipline in context.

    At 11 AM: Bridging Generations: Young Architects Forum. Emerging professionals, mid-career architects, and AIA Fellows in the same room for an open discussion. The people in YAF are building the next version of practice, thinking about delivery and technology differently than the established generation. That’s who I want to meet.

    At 1 PM: Small Firms and AI: Build Your Low-Risk AI Starter Kit. Small firms under 10 people, AI they can actually use on Monday, prompts included. I’ve been using AI in my own workflow for over a year. I’m going to compare notes, not catch up. If the starter kit surprises me, you’ll read about it in a Future Field Note.

    If you made it this far

    You just read someone’s conference schedule from start to finish. At this point we basically know each other.

    I run a BIM studio working with architecture firms in the US and Latin America. If you’re going to AIA26 and any of this resonates with where your practice is headed, let’s make it official and actually meet.

    Book a time before June 10: calendly.com/shapestudiopro

    Field Notes is a series documenting my preparation for and attendance at AIA26 in San Diego. Follow along at shapestudio.pro.

     
  • Field Note 01: I Found the Venue in GT7 Before I Opened the Conference Program

    Field Note 01: I Found the Venue in GT7 Before I Opened the Conference Program

    I’m going to AIA 2026 in San Diego. June 10 to 13.

    It’s my first time.

    When I told people around me, the reaction was unanimous: genuine excitement. Not the polite kind. The kind where someone grabs your arm and says “wait, seriously?” That reaction alone told me this was the right call.

    But here’s how I actually found out I was excited about it.

    A few weeks ago I was playing Gran Turismo 7 with my friend Agustín. He’s a web designer, not an architect, but fully obsessed with sim racing. We share that specific combination of caring too much about how things are designed and wanting to go very fast in fictional cars.

    We were in the Scapes, GT7’s photo mode. Thousands of real locations, carefully documented. Not everyone goes there. So we built a scene: I picked the location using what I know as an architect, Agustín picked the car, his favorite. A Jaguar XJ220, British Racing Green, parked under the arched concrete canopy of the San Diego Convention Center.

    I had only seen that building once before. On Google Maps.

    I had not opened the conference program. I had not read a single session description. But somehow my brain had already filed that building as something worth knowing.

    That’s the mindset I’m bringing to San Diego. The one that finds the building in the photo mode before it reads the agenda.

    Over the next few weeks I’ll be publishing field notes here, before the conference, during it, and probably after. Honest, specific, about what it actually looks like to take a BIM studio from Montevideo to one of the largest architecture conferences in the world.

    And if you’re going to AIA 2026, the coffee link is right below.