Thornton Tomasetti | CORE studio, in partnership with CBT Architects, Suffolk Construction, Speckle, and Perkins & Will
August 20-23 | 2026 | BOSTON, USA
AECtech+ Boston | 2026 Hackathon
AECtech+ Boston | 2026 Thornton Tomasetti CORE studio Workshop
AECtech+ Boston | 2026 Perkins & Will Workshop
SPECKLE Happy Hour & AI Panel
Thursday, August 20th | 4:00-7:00 | @ Suffolk Construction
How Can AEC Firms Turn Data & AI Into Better Outcomes
Join us at Suffolk's Boston office for an evening of candid conversation on one of the industry's most pressing questions:
We'll run two back-to-back panels, each 30 minutes, followed by networking drinks.
What AI-Native Looks Like in AEC: The Vendors Reshaping AEC's Technology Stack
Brings together the technologists and solution builders, vendors working at the intersection of AI, data infrastructure, and AEC, to share what they're building, why, and where they see the biggest opportunities ahead.
Making It Work: How Leading AECO Firms Are Navigating Data and AI in Practice
Shifts to the practitioners: leaders from across the industry who are talking openly about what's working, what's still falling short, and what they've learned as they try to make data-driven delivery real on actual projects.
MODERATOR | What AI-Native Looks Like in AEC
PANELISTS
MODERATOR | Making It Work
PANELISTS
Workshops
Friday, August 21St | 9:00am-5:00pm | @ Multiple Location
AGENDA
9:00 am
10:00 am
1:00 pm
2:00 pm
5:00 pm
Registration
Workshops Begin
Lunch
Workshops Resume
Workshops Close
Workshop Location: Thornton Tomasetti
101 Arch St #1600, Boston, MA 02110
A Practical Guide to MCP & Multi-Agent Workflows
Thornton Tomsetti | CORE studio
Agentic AI and MCPs are all the rage these days, but it can be difficult to separate hype from substance. If you'd like to learn about these emerging technologies but aren't sure where to start, join our full-day workshop for a step-by-step, beginner-friendly, and AEC-focused walkthrough of the latest AI protocols. You will learn what Model Context Protocol is, how it works, and how to build your own MCP servers to help automate various design workflows. We will also take a look at MCP features within the latest release of the Swiftlet Grasshopper plugin, which will let us interact with a Rhino model using an LLM. From there, we will explore AI agents, how to easily build them using open-source frameworks, and how to let multiple agents collaborate with each other via the A2A (Agent to Agent) protocol.
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Sergey Pigach is a Senior Associate Applications Engineer at CORE studio | Thornton Tomasetti. Trained as an architect, he has spent nearly a decade developing computational tools for designers, architects, and engineers across the AEC industry. As part of CORE AI, the R&D group focused on practical applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning in structural engineering, Sergey led the development of Cortex, CORE studio's ML-ops pipeline. His current work centers on research in agentic AI, AI safety, security, and emerging interoperability protocols such as MCP and A2A.
Workshop Location: Perkins & Will
225 Franklin St Ste 700, Boston, MA 02110
Collaborative Vibe Coding for AEC
Perkins & Will
This is a fun, collaborative vibe-coding workshop focused on how teams can rapidly develop toward a shared goal. Rather than treating “one-shotting” an app as a solitary exercise, the workshop will show how designers, technologists, and subject-matter experts can work together to frame a problem, define scope, contribute domain knowledge, test assumptions, and refine a working prototype. Participants will leave with a practical framework they can bring back to their firms to make vibe coding more collaborative, engaging, and useful.
No coding background necessary, just a laptop with a browser and curiosity. You'll learn to use AI to write code, use GitHub to collaborate with your team (branches, pull requests, merge conflicts and all), and build small AEC-flavored apps — a 3D viewer, a markup tool, and/or a data dashboard. You'll walk out ready for the next day's hackathon, and the resources and knowledge needed to run this exact workshop back at your own firm.
WHO IS THIS WORKSHOP FOR
Architects, engineers, PMs, and anyone in AEC who's curious about AI coding but has never opened a terminal — no prior coding experience required. If you can use a browser and you're willing to try, you're the target audience.
5 KEY TAKEAWAYS
You can prompt an AI into building real software — not just chat with it, but iterate with it until something actually works.
Git and GitHub stop being scary — you'll branch, commit, and open a pull request, and you'll have already survived a real merge conflict before the hackathon. You will be ready to vibe code alongside other vibe-coders in the same vibe coded repo.
You'll leave with a deployed, working app — built and merged with a team, not just a local file on your laptop.
You'll walk into tomorrow's hackathon with zero setup friction — same tools, same workflow, muscle memory already built.
You'll leave with the playbook to run this workshop yourself — slides, starter repo, facilitation script — all ready for you to run this same process to share back with your firm.
PREREQUISITES
A laptop with a modern browser (Chrome, Edge, or Firefox) that's it.
No installs required; we'll use GitHub Codespaces in-browser.A free GitHub account, created before the day
(takes 2 minutes, saves 10 in the room).A Claude account — free tier is fine.
If your firm restricts personal AI tool accounts, check with IT beforehand so this isn't a surprise on the day.
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Luke Gehron graduated from Auburn University in 2016 with a B.Arch, and from Boston University in 2022 with a M.S. Computer Science. He worked at several architectural firms across NYC, then moved to Boston where he joined the architectural firm Payette as a Design Technologist. He then spent a few years as a Software Engineer at the AEC startup Atmos, and currently is a Computational Designer at Perkins & Will.
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Nirvik Saha is a Digital Innovation Technologist at Perkins&Will, where he builds applications at the intersection of several domains, including interoperability, computer vision and deep learning, large language models, and cloud services. In this role, he collaborates with designers, as well as the Digital Practice and Research groups, to enhance design and construction workflows through the application of emerging technologies.
From 2020 to 2022, Nirvik served as a Postgraduate Research Scientist at the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) in Brooklyn, where he worked with Dennis Shelden on data interoperability and contributed to the research and development of IFC, the open international data standard for buildings.
Prior to joining CASE, he was a Graduate Research Assistant at the Digital Building Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he worked with Dr. Shelden on the design and implementation of geometry kernels, data representation of building geometry, and computational architecture frameworks. He also worked with the Urban Ecology Lab under Perry Yang, researching energy-efficient buildings using reinforcement learning in urban contexts. This collaborative research led to multiple publications and has been applied in both academic and professional settings.
Nirvik holds a Ph.D. in Architecture (Design Computation) from Georgia Institute of Technology, a Master of Science in Urban Design (MS.Arch) from The Glasgow School of Art, and a Bachelor of Architecture from BMS College of Engineering.
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Bio Coming Soon
Hackathon
Saturday, August 22nd | 9:00am | @ CBT Architects
Create something incredible with a team of your peers during the 26-hour hackathon. Starting on Saturday morning and ending on Sunday afternoon. AECtech Hackathons are events for programmers, developers, engineers, and others at all levels. Additionally, it aims to facilitate collaboration, networking, relationship-building, and the generation of new ideas and processes for the AEC community.
AGENDA
Saturday, August 22nd | 9:00 am
9:30 am
10:00 am
10:30 am
11:00 am
11:30 am
1:00 pm
7:00 pm
Sunday, August 23rd | 11:00 am
11:30 am
12:00 pm
2:00 pm
2:30 pm
Registration
Hackathon Kickoff
Lightning Round
Team Formation
Hacking Begins!
Facilities Onboarding
Lunch
Dinner
Pencils Down
Submit Presentations / Lunch
Team Presentations
Hackathon Judging
Winners Announced
JUDGING & AWARDS
Categories & Prizes
There are three award categories for the best Hackathon entries.
Best Overall Hack
MOST COLLABORATIVE HACK
Most Impactful Hack
Prizes are sponsored by
https://www.nomic.ai/
https://graitec.com/us/
Judges
A multidisciplinary panel of judges will review each team’s hackathon project.
