One thing has shifted in how structure companies discuss know-how. Three years in the past, in 2022 and 2023, a lot of the dialog was very speculative — possibly AI will change how we design — however how? Later, a barrage of Midjourney photographs hit with power, and AI utterly overtook the architectural tech discourse. In the meantime, whispers about how recreation engines may doubtlessly reshape visualization pipelines remained, as did the rising perception that BIM wanted to evolve previous its present limitations.

Now, nonetheless, the “mights,” “coulds” and “shoulds” have given strategy to one thing extra pressing: a rising sense that the trade is mid-transformation, and that the architects who perceive it can outline what follow appears to be like like for the subsequent era. It’s into this second — charged, unsure and alive with chance — that the ATN Summit has taken type.

Two days, one stage, world-leading companies, and a intentionally TED-style format, the occasion was designed to verify each speak earns its place within the room. The Summit is the flagship occasion of Archi-Tech Community (ATN): a platform based by Oliver Thomas, a former Design Know-how Supervisor at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), who has spent 5 years on the intersection of structure, know-how, and knowledge-sharing. It’ll happen at Protein Studios in Shoreditch, London, from March 18th to nineteenth, 2026.

From Clubhouse to Convention

ATN didn’t start with grand ambitions. It started, as lots of the finest issues did, within the early days of COVID, with a podcast on Clubhouse, a chat app that briefly turned the web into one monumental, unruly salon. “You had been simply in a room with Snoop Dogg speaking about NFTs,” Oliver remembers, laughing, “after which Elon Musk would pop in. It was a bizarre second.”

However beneath the chaos, Oliver noticed one thing actual: a niche he’d been watching widen from his desk at BIG. “Even there, we had been seeing junior, mid-level, and senior folks come into the workplace with out the digital ability set they wanted to truly work in follow,” he explains. “If that is what we’re experiencing from folks in New York, from Harvard — there’s clearly one thing lacking between college and follow.”

The prevailing panorama wasn’t a lot assist. On one finish: formal, dry coaching assets. On the opposite: a wave of younger on-line creators who had been partaking and accessible, however typically lacking essential real-world grounding. Oliver noticed the hole between them and determined to occupy it — instructing structure know-how from the attitude of follow, with the sensibility of somebody who’d lived each worlds.

What started as a weekly podcast grew right into a YouTube channel, then into programs protecting Rhino, Revit, and Grasshopper. Inside, AI, and visualization — all taught from the within out, the way in which Oliver had educated folks inside BIG itself. Then got here the occasions. When he moved again to London and took up the position of Design Know-how Supervisor at BIG’s London workplace, he may really feel one thing else within the air: a post-COVID starvation to be in a room with different folks. So he created one.

Pecha Kucha within the Pub was a deliberate reinvention of the structure meetup format. In brief: no hour-long talks. As an alternative, 20 slides, 20 seconds every, beginning in a pub so folks already had a drink in hand. No awkward sponsor pitches wedged into the center. Simply quick, sharp concepts and the form of dialog that truly occurs at 9pm fairly than being rushed into the final beer earlier than the final tube. Each occasion offered out (some inside half-hour!). The format traveled to Copenhagen, New York, and finally to Epic Video games’ innovation lab in London.

The Summit is the place all of that leads. “It’s principally a fruits of 5 years of doing ATN,” Oliver says (therefore the title, Summit). “These little meetups have advanced into the massive leagues.”

What Makes This Completely different

Structure conferences have a fame. There’s the trestle-table sponsor zone, the clash-detection pitch no person requested for, the keynote audio system who’ve given the identical speak thrice already this 12 months. The ATN Summit has been designed, consciously and with some glee, as an antidote to all of it.

The format is TED-style: 20–25 minute talks, again to again, one stage, no competing streams. (“I hate when you have got a number of phases and also you need to see two folks however you may’t,” Oliver says.) The sponsor zone has been reconceived because the Innovation Pub — high-top bar tables, open dialog, and a beer faucet within the afternoon. The form of area the place you sit down subsequent to somebody constructing the subsequent era of BIM software program and truly need to hear what they’re engaged on, as in case you had been sitting in a pub.

The speaker lineup displays 5 years of real relationships, not a reserving company. BIG, Foster + Companions, Zaha Hadid Architects, MVRDV, Heatherwick Studio and Mamou-Mani, alongside a constellation of startups reshaping the instruments of follow: Motif, Qonic, Giraffe, Finch, Speckle and Automated Structure (and lots of extra — you may learn the complete lineup right here). The conversations between these worlds — established world companies and the lean, fast-moving corporations constructing the software program they’ll use subsequent — are the type that don’t typically occur in the identical room.

And the room itself is genuinely worldwide. As of some weeks earlier than the occasion, attendees had registered from 28 nations, with over 100 companies represented within the viewers. The stability skews skilled — this can be a convention for practitioners, not a scholar expo — however scholar tickets can be found, and the ATN Affect Day operating on the Saturday after the primary Summit has been priced particularly to be accessible to junior and rising voices.

Architect 3.0: What You’ll Really Stroll Away With

Oliver talks concerning the worth of in-person occasions with the conviction of somebody whose profession was formed by them. A single convention in 2014, Sensible Geometry, related him to the individuals who finally led him to BIG. “From this one convention, I met all these completely different folks,” he says. “It was proper on the time I wished to get into computational design. Did I need to do a level? So I merely went to a convention about it — and that actually introduced me into this world.”

What the Summit presents is more durable to quantify than a workshop certificates, however extra lasting: the inspiration of seeing what’s really attainable at the vanguard, and the serendipity of being in a room when it issues. You’ll hear from architects who’re utilizing computation and AI to drive daylight and photo voltaic evaluation, from companies like Mamou-Mani who’re 3D-printing recyclable furnishings and taking it again on the finish of its lifecycle to reprint the subsequent undertaking, and from startups utilizing timber automation to make sustainable building economically viable. And also you’ll hear one thing extra shocking — a severe dialog about recreation engines.

“Everybody is targeted on AI, however this world of Unreal Engine, increasingly architects moving into this area after which having alternatives in movie, VFX, gaming — I believe it’s a extremely slept-on side of the trade proper now,” Oliver says. It’s one of many Summit’s deliberate interventions: to create space for the conversations the trade isn’t fairly having but, alongside those it might probably’t cease having.

As a result of behind all of it’s a larger query. Oliver calls it Architect 3.0 — a shift as important because the transfer from drafting by hand to CAD. On this new period, AI and rising instruments aren’t changing architects; they’re accelerating the elements of follow that don’t want human ingenuity, so the elements that do can breathe. However the career must be intentional about what it does with that freedom. “We’re already doing extra, even sooner, for a similar quantity,” Oliver says. “If we’re not cautious, AI will do the identical factor.”

That’s the dialog the Summit exists to have.

The ATN Summit takes place 18–19 March 2026 at Protein Studios, Shoreditch, London. Tickets and additional data can be found at atn-summit.com.