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 1, Episode 44 /Jan 23, 2025
Reimagining architectural practice through technology
Tyler Putnam, Integrated Projects
Jan 23, 2025 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Reimagining architectural practice through technology
Tyler Putnam is a licensed architect who became a senior solutions engineer at Integrated Projects, the company that converts laser scans of existing buildings into BIM models. He has sat in the offices of dozens of firms trying to move from CAD to BIM, and now sells the service that replaces the survey. The conversation is about why those transitions fail, why scanning is the ground truth under any model, and why selling done right is just problem solving.
Tyler Putnam, Senior Solutions Engineer, Integrated Projects
In this conversation
Tyler's rule for firms: stop insisting you are unique and fix the same three problems everyone has.
Why the biggest practices, Gensler, KPF, HKS, distinguished themselves on production and process rather than on any particular tool.
What owners actually worry about when they hear 'scan-to-BIM': asset management, not modeling, which changes what the deliverable should be.
His reframing of sales as problem solving, and the one-minute test he uses to tell a seller who is solving from one who is pitching.
Every firm that I talk to, they say well, we're a little bit different. But the concerns all really boil down to very similar things.
Tyler Putnam
Chapters
Every firm says it's different
What is actually the same about every architecture firm's technology problems.
Production, process and the big firms
How the largest firms leveraged technology for production, and what that requires of everyone else.
By the numbers
Gross billings at U.S. architecture firms in 2023
Tyler says the largest firms won on production and process, not on any tool. This is the size of the market they are competing for.
Source: AIA Firm Survey Report 2024 ↗What owners actually worry about
The concerns owners bring to existing-building data that architects rarely hear.
Practical AI, not theoretical AI
Where AI already helps in scan-to-BIM work, and where it does not yet.
Sales as problem solving
How a designer turned computational manager came to enjoy selling.
If we consider the BIM as the single source of digital truth, laser scanning is sort of the ground truth underneath it.
Tyler Putnam
Takeaways
Every firm says it is different, and after enough offices the concerns boil down to the same few things. Be technology-agnostic and enforce whatever meets the business objective across the whole team.
CAD-to-BIM transitions fail for one reason: every department has to sign on to a single mission, and that is a change in behavior, not a software install.
If BIM is the single source of digital truth for a project, laser scanning is what anchors it to reality, and owners, who arrive last, carry the biggest risk if it is wrong.
The way I think about sales is that it really should be problem solving.
Tyler Putnam