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.
Leave a Reply