Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 25 /Apr 3, 2026
Why Arkio's co-founder stopped building buildings to fix architecture's broken tools
Johan Hanegraaf, Arkio
Apr 3, 2026 /Design & Practice
Why Arkio's co-founder stopped building buildings to fix architecture's broken tools
Johan Hanegraaf is the co-founder and head of product at Arkio, software that lets teams sketch, review and present buildings in virtual and mixed reality. He trained and practiced as an architect before switching to building tools. He has lived through every generation of headset, which makes him a reliable judge of what changed and what did not.
Johan Hanegraaf, Co-founder & Head of Product, Arkio
In this conversation
The moment Johan realized the profession's tools were broken, in school and again in practice.
Why people think a rendering tells them the size of a room until they walk into the building they spent three years designing.
How Arkio handles AI models that change monthly: let the user choose which one to use rather than betting the company.
His view on who wins the race to model the world, and why it may be whoever already holds the maps.
You see everyone is basically struggling with the softwares and how our processes are working in the architecture field.
Johan Hanegraaf
Chapters
Building tools instead of buildings
Why an architect chose to make software instead of buildings.
Why VR was always almost there
The reasons virtual reality stayed almost ready for a decade.
By the numbers
Launch price of a mixed-reality headset
Johan says the shift was hardware economics, not software. The device that made mixed reality practical costs a tenth of its predecessor.
Source: Manufacturer launch prices: Microsoft HoloLens 2 (2019), Meta Quest 3 (2023), Quest 3S (2024) ↗Building the commercial case
How Arkio built a business as the hardware kept changing.
Multiplayer
Whether shared, multiplayer design is the key to adoption.
What propels a founder
What pushed Johan to start a company.
I don't think there will be any format that's just going to wipe away all the other formats that we already have because things move very slow in our industry.
Johan Hanegraaf
Takeaways
Every designer struggles with the same tools and every new hire struggles with the workflow. That shared frustration is why Johan builds tools instead of buildings.
The shift was hardware economics: from $3,000 headsets with cables and sensors to a $400 device with color pass-through that makes mixed reality the natural mode for architecture.
No single file format will replace the others, because this industry moves slowly on purpose. Build for coexistence.
Seeing the people enjoy the little tools that I built for myself, that was the main drive for me to step into the tool building instead of the building.
Johan Hanegraaf