AECtech + 2025 | Barcelona

Thank you to everyone who attended the AECtech + Barcelona 2025!

On June 13-15, McNeel Europe and BIG Architects/ hosted the second AECtech+ Barcelona event.

 

AECtech Barcelona 2025

 

Workshops

The event began with a series of morning workshops led by Ara 3d, IaaC, Modelup, and CORE studio.

 

Modelup Workshop

Ara 3d Workshop

 

IaaC | Exploring Buildings as Graphs

David Andrés León | Director, MaCAD IaaC

Sophie Moore | Senior Applications Developer, Thornton Tomasetti CORE studio

Representing buildings as graphs enables efficient analysis of spatial relationships, navigation, and connectivity by abstracting their properties based on their relationships. This approach helps humans and computers understand buildings, enabling tasks like pathfinding, optimization, and simulation. The workshop will focus on representing and visualizing buildings as graphs while exploring their opportunities. Participants will learn how to convert IFC files to graphs, visualize them in a web application to get insights, and query their properties using LLMs.

Ara3D | Fundamentals of Parametric Geometry in C#

Christopher Diggins | Founder, Ara 3D

One of the great advantages of using code is that you don’t have to be an expert in trigonometry to create or transform shapes and 3D objects mathematically. This is possible because we can break down complex transformations and formulas into simple functions that can be easily modified and recombined.

In this workshop, we will teach you just enough C# so you can create complex 2D and 3D shapes—forms that would otherwise be extremely difficult to model and modify by hand—by combining these modular building blocks and plugging in simple mathematical formulas.

In addition to exploring classical discrete geometric data structures (for example, meshes, point clouds, and voxels), we will also venture into the fascinating realm of parametric geometry (for example, constructive solid geometry, signed distance fields, and parametric surfaces) and see how these approaches interrelate, opening up new possibilities in design.

CORE studio | From Nodes to Code: Parametric Design for Beginners

Alloy Kemp | Vice President, Thornton Tomasetti CORE studio

David Mans | Director of AECtech, Thornton Tomasetti CORE studio

This workshop is designed to cater to a broad range of Grasshopper users, from those in their early days of learning building modeling workflows to more seasoned users seeking a foundation in plugin development.

The two-part workshop begins with an introduction to establishing a parametric core-and-shell tower model. Participants will learn how to structure their Grasshopper definitions to efficiently generate clean core, slab, facade, and structural geometry and extract and visualize critical project data and metrics. This exploration of parametric design will culminate in a panel rationalization exercise using Kangaroo, where participants will analyze trade-offs arising from balancing practical design considerations.

Building upon this model, the second part of the workshop focuses on developing C# components to facilitate real-time, automated PDF documentation derived from a dynamic design model. Participants will gain proficiency in loading external libraries into Grasshopper to expand workflows and learn how to transition code from Grasshopper to Visual Studio to produce redistributable plugins for collaborative use.

Modelup | Developing 3D apps with Rhino Compute

Emil Poulsen | Co-Founder, Modelup

Lucas Wiener | Co-Founder, Modelup

This hands-on workshop explores how Rhino Compute can be used to power cloud-based applications with Rhino and Grasshopper logic under the hood. We’ll walk through real-world examples of how to set up and connect to Rhino Compute and integrate geometry workflows into custom apps. Whether you're building configurators, analysis tools, or interactive geometry apps, this session will give you the building blocks and practical insights to get started or level up your Rhino Compute development.

Symposium

Friday afternoon concluded with an inspirational panel of presentations from local and international Institutions, Software Companies, and AEC Firms.

 

AECtech 2025 Barcelona Symposium

 

CODA

Pep Tornabell | Associate Partner

Enrique Soriano | Associate Partner

ACPV Architects

Vincenzo Panasiti | Head of Design Technology

Giovanni Consiglio | Computational Design & R&D Unit Leader

Modelup

Emil Poulsen | CEO & Co Founder

Lucas Wiener | CTO & CO FOUNDER

BIG

Andreas Bak | Computational Design Global Lead

Thornton Tomasetti | CORE studio

Jeroen Janssen | CORE Studio UK Lead / Associate Director

Georgios Athanasopoulos | Senior Computational Designer

McNeel

Luis E. Fraguada | Software Developer

Hackathon

Over the course of 24 hours, over 40 participants pitched ideas and competed in 6 teams for the Best Overall, Most Collaborative, and Most Impactful Hack.

 
 

BEST OVERALL HACK

No-Code-Nodes

A collection of explorations focusing on building and surface data processing using n8n workflows and custom nodes. It represents the exploration of using no-code/low-code tools for AEC data processing and analysis.

Team: Agnieszka Nowacka / Shapediver, Ahmed Wael Ismail / EPFL, Karim Daw / Gensler, Nouhaila ElMalouli, Omar El-Tahrany, Rami Anka

MOST COLLABORATIVE HACK

Stag

STAG is a Rhino plugin built for AEC professionals to bring structured stage management and geometry governance directly into the modeling environment.

Track the lifecycle of elements — from Design ➜ Production ➜ Fabrication — using Rhino's built-in User Attributes without disrupting your workflow. STAG makes your geometry smart, trackable, and protected through customizable stages and event listeners.

Team: Ahmed Salah El-Sonpaty / DAR, Eesha Jain / Thornton Tomasetti CORE studio, Ammar Abed / DAR, Razi S / LINK Architects, Sylvain Usai / Design-to-Production, Sevan Mohammadpour / IaaC, Ziad Mahmoud / DAR

MOST IMPACTFUL HACK

Rhino Inside Rhino

Bridging the gap between the specialist and the user, removing the knowledge barrier that requires harvesting the parametric opportunities that Grasshopper provides in a simple Rhino environment.

Team: Andreas Bak / BIG Architects, Erfan Rezaei / Parametric House, German Otto Bodenbender / BIG Architects, Hugo Riche / IaaC, Mirek Classen / Big Rep, Tarang Gupta, Xavier Garnavault

Zono_Nauts

Training an AI to dream up the next chapter of a city's growth. Using urban data + GNN, we predict how the city might evolve, then compress that future into a single voxel. Asking “what if cities could be played like a (Minecraft) game?”

Team: Nihal Mannath, Mısra Serenay Özgök, Samarth Pachchigar, Sahil Yousaf, Fady Nasr, Kerollus Makkar

Paramatrix

From Pixels to parameters: explorations in constructing parametric 3d building models from a reference image input.

Team: Abdellah Choufani, Eleni Papakosta, Ertuğrul Akdemir, Michele Cobelli, Carmine A Rago

Code2Code

This project aims to address the age-old problem of allowing designers to quickly check if their BIM models are code compliant with their local or foreign regulations. The project is a web page that allows the user to upload the model, along with a document of the regulation to specify, and through prompting with an LLM, understand if the model is correctly implementing these regulations using a generated graph database of the IFC model and the regulatory documentation.

Team: Edwin Hernandez, Salvador Cantuarias, Bradley Manucha, Eleftheria Papadosifou, Dawid Drożdż, Sanjay Kumar, Aleksandra Kraeva

Judges

Hackathon entries were judged by an esteemed panel of industry & academic leaders

CORE studio