Ceramics, the Parthenon, and a Two Day Hackathon

Reope Festival, Athens Edition

We're a team of architects and engineers who code, split between Oslo and the rest of Europe. Most weeks we talk over a screen share. So when we do get everyone in one room, we try not to waste it on the things you can do over video anyway.

We brought the whole team for our annual Reope Festival together for a few days and both had a blast and learned a few new things! Everyone in the same city the team building things for ourselves. Eating together. Running together and this time also making some ceramic together.

We started with clay

We're makers before anything else. The work we do is creative and precise. The first afternoon was a ceramics class at a studio called Kato Kosmos. No brief, no deliverable, just everyone making something with a piece of clay. There's a reason we open this way and not with a strategy session. Watching the team throw themselves into a craft none of us were any good at set the tone for the week, meeting everyone in a relaxed setting.

Then a great traditional Greek dinner at Taverna Saita where conversations drifted from a bug someone's been chasing to vacation plans and everything else. Eva and Iliana were the hosts for this years Reope Festival and the care they took in putting this week together showed from the first evening.

We did some actual work

The next morning there was a sightseeing run around the Acropolis and throught the Botanical Gardens for those so inclined. Then we took over a coworking space at Pi55 for the middle of the week and did a bit of client work to make sure we don't fall too far behind on all our commitments. This also allowed us to fully focus on the hackathon for the next few days!

The hackathon

Two days, three teams, three problems we actually wanted solved. Filippo and Kaloyan ran it, picked the challenges, and kept things moving. Each team took a workflow and tried to get a working prototype out the other end by Thursday afternoon.

One team built a detective for our own bugs. One turned a design meeting into a Revit model, with the Parthenon as the test case. One taught more of our tools to talk to AI agents. Each gets its own post, so I'll leave the detail there.

Did we go crazy and work through the night? Nope, we worked until we came together for dinner and drinks and then started early next morning again. Our hackathons has a somewhat relaxed pace until the very end where everyone gets frantic about committing the code and preparing the presentation with a few well crafted prompts.

A site visit to remember what it's all for

On Thursday around lunch we took a break from Hacking and we went to Ellinikon, the enormous redevelopment on the old Athens airport site. This was the hardest thing to organise. Turns out coordinating people away from their screens is harder than any script we've written, and Iliana and Eva made it happen anyway.

We spend our days inside software that designs buildings and often our tools are meant to collapse the distance to a remote site. Standing on a live site that one of our customers has designed is a useful jolt. Every day we help an architect, and eventually a place like this gets built a bit faster and a bit better. It's easy to lose the thread of that from behind a laptop, hundreds of kilometres from the site.

Meeting the Greek design and BIM community

We closed with an evening panel at ΣΜΟΛ with Astylab, our first proper introduction to the design and BIM community in Athens. The conversation moved across how AI is changing the way people design, how the economics shift when tools get cheap to build, and how any of this actually is implemented inside a firm.

Why we keep doing this

A week like this isn't a reward. It's mostly Resaerch & Development. It's also part of how we stay the kind of company we want to be. Creativity, integrity and fun are all key to our daily work. They're most of the reason our small group of incredible people can do work that excites customers like BIG, Heatherwick and Multiconsult.