Architecture is made of visions, dreams and matter. But sometimes it is also made of relationships. Some are brief. Some change us. Some begin quietly; others arrive like love at first sight. My first encounter with Revit, on 16 January 2005, belonged to the second kind.
At first, the attraction was tentative — almost reluctant. Revit looked complicated, stubborn, difficult to read. I tried to ignore it and stay loyal to what I already knew. Rhino, with its beautiful lofts, was my reliable partner: familiar, powerful and reassuring. I did not think I needed anything else.
And yet, every time I saw the Revit icon on my desktop, curiosity won. I would open it, explore, fail, close it again. A few small victories, a lot of frustration, and those merciless alerts that seemed to say: you have no chance with me. But architecture has always rewarded a certain kind of stubbornness, and I wanted to understand it.
The story had actually started a little earlier. About a year before, I had fractured my right hand for the first time. It was an accident, but it also forced a question on me that I could not ignore. I had chosen architecture because I loved drawing. At university, people often complimented my hand — literally, the way I drew. And suddenly I was wondering: how could I build my future around a hand that might one day fail me?
That fear pushed me towards architectural technology and then towards digital design. In 2004 I went through what I can only describe as a semester of digital euphoria: Dreamweaver, Flash, Cinema 4D and every new tool I could get my hands on. I became hungry for what was happening outside the traditional walls of architecture school. Watercolours and ink dots on cardboard no longer felt like the whole story.
I became fascinated by ruled surfaces, matrices and the formulas hidden inside geometry. Parametric design offered something intoxicating: the possibility of turning an idea into a system, and a system into parts that could actually be fabricated. I wanted to see how abstract geometry could respond to constraints, material efficiency and construction logic. When I met Revit, it felt like the natural place to continue those conversations.
Then came masses, parametric formulas and adaptive families. What had seemed impenetrable began to open up. Suddenly the model was not just a drawing of an object. It could generate information about the object itself — pieces, relationships, quantities, variations. It felt like magic. Or at least, that was how I experienced it then.
Architects can be wonderfully vain. We want to control form, matter and process. In my enthusiasm, I started imagining a perfect future: no errors, no delays, no compromises. A world in which the architect could finally build exactly what had been imagined, without distortion or misunderstanding. Technology would close the gap between idea and reality.
Utopia or dystopia?
The longer I worked with digital tools, the more a small doubt grew underneath the excitement. A world of perfect projects, with no accidents, no surprises, no deviations — was that really what I wanted?
Then, on 20 November 2012, I understood something that now seems obvious but felt revolutionary at the time: Revit is not BIM.
I was working in a large engineering company on an international project. I had already spent months coordinating organisational charts, communication flows, time zones and responsibilities. My speed in Revit — probably at its peak then — was almost irrelevant. I felt like someone who had become fluent in the wrong language for the room.
During a project presentation, the client asked for an enormous change: move a canyon, a couple of towers and everything connected to them, on a project already deep into development. That request made the scale of the BIM problem suddenly visible to me. The real challenge was not moving geometry. It was understanding who needed to know, what had to change, which decisions were connected, what the consequences were and how the whole process could remain governable.
That day, software moved into the background. Method came forward.
If Revit had been my first technological love, BIM became the arranged marriage I had to learn to live with. It promised efficiency, precision and total collaboration. It also brought rules, portals, workflows, interfaces, permissions and login after login — sometimes a thousand doors leading to what was supposed to be one shared source of information.
At times BIM felt like the only possible answer: a method capable of bringing order to complexity and translating intuition into process. At other times it felt like a beautiful cage — a structure so rigid that the process risked becoming more important than the architecture it was meant to support.
For years I wondered whether the frustration meant I was the problem. If BIM was the perfect solution, why did it sometimes feel so heavy?
Perhaps because technology can never completely replace creative disorder. Perhaps because architecture also lives in error, accident, interpretation and the unexpected idea that appears because something did not go according to plan. Technology can help us make better decisions. It cannot make the human choices for us.
After twenty years of enthusiasm, conflict, discovery and disappointment, I no longer look for a single verdict. BIM is a challenge, an opportunity and, in many contexts, a necessity. But it is not the answer to everything.
Architecture remains a human act: an act of interpretation, choice and compromise.
BIM and I have had our highs and lows, our passionate phases and our late-night arguments. What I have learned is that its value does not lie in technology alone. It lies in the possibility of making design and construction more informed, more coordinated and more conscious.
We are still together, somehow. Maybe that is what happens in the most complicated relationships: you keep looking for a new balance. You keep being surprised — not only by what technology can do, but by what it can still teach you about your own profession.
So if you are approaching BIM today, my advice is simple: remain yourself. Stay calm. Know what you are good at. Do not abandon your technical identity just because a digital process seems to demand a different language. Start without expecting perfection. Accept a few disappointments. Learn the method, not only the interface.
Because BIM is not an absolute reality hovering above us. It is something we created to support technical work, organise complexity and help us build with greater awareness. And in the end, BIM is only as intelligent, useful and human as the people behind it.
In the end, BIM is us.
