Applied Innovation in Architecture from Inception to Delivery

There was far too much good stuff at NXTBLD 2025 to pack into one post, but this is where I wanted to begin. These are reflections from me, Joachim at Reope, representing our small but brilliant team of architects who code. We help design professionals get more out of the tools they already use such as Revit, Rhino, and others by customizing them to fit the way real teams work. We do this quietly behind the scenes, but at NXTBLD, a bit of that work took the spotlight.

The session by Heatherwick Studio, presented by the brilliant Alfonso and Pablo, was a personal highlight. They walked the audience through their approach to design, which is bold, tactile, expressive, and deeply human. Their philosophy doesn’t rely on a single drawing or render to tell the story of a project. Instead, they focus on materiality, texture, sequence and on the feeling of architecture.

Two of the best quotes in my personal opinion were:

“An image is not enough.” by Pablo. To me this sums up the current state of GenAI and the creative process of architecture in an elegant way.
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“How do we make things fast?” by Alfonso. This timely question is always important, but in this context it stood out to me because it's what our design and BIM tools should enable; qucik iterations from idea to design to documentation to construction to operations.

Those two quotes landed hard. They capture the tension all of us are navigating: we’re in an industry under constant pressure to move faster, automate more, and feed increasingly large project pipelines. But design, real design, cannot being flattened into one image or one click.

At Reope, we’ve had the privilege of collaborating with the team at Heatherwick over several years. From Metrics and ClimateMetrics in Rhino to AutoDocs, ScopeBoxes, Export to Miro/SheetMirror, BIM Pulse/Radar in Revit, we’ve worked with them to build a suite of tools that actually fit their workflows.

Seeing those tools presented live, woven into their story, not as gimmicks, but as genuine design enablers, was powerful. That’s what we aim for with every collaboration: to help architects spend less time pushing software around and more time designing buildings that matter.

Too often, BIM and documentation are treated like a box-checking exercise. What Heatherwick showed is that when you connect documentation to design intent, it becomes something else entirely: a narrative. A system of meaning. A support structure for something profoundly human.

There’s much more to say about the rest of the conference, but this moment, this reframing of what tools are for, set the tone for me.

Stay tuned for more NXTBLD reflections soon.

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