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 22 /Nov 8, 2025
Why BIM interoperability is a trap
Dimitrie Stefanescu, Speckle Systems
Nov 8, 2025 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Why BIM interoperability is a trap
Dimitrie Stefanescu founded Speckle, an open-source platform that lets design and construction software exchange data, after a PhD and years as an architect. Interoperability, getting one tool's files to work in another, has been the industry's complaint for decades. His argument is that the complaint was misdiagnosed from the start.
Dimitrie Stefanescu, Founder, CEO, Speckle Systems
In this conversation
Dimitrie's case for why patching file exchanges is a trap.
How Speckle balances open source with the pressures of running a company, and why it moved to a for-profit structure.
What users actually buy: walking into a client meeting with a model and a dashboard that tells a story.
His advice to his younger self: ask for money earlier, and leave enough value on the table to lift the whole industry.
It's a thing about creating trust between people, making sure you trust your builder and that your builder trusts you.
Dimitrie Stefanescu
Chapters
From architect to Speckle
Why an architect with a PhD started a data company.
By the numbers
Annual cost of inadequate interoperability in the U.S. capital facilities industry, two-thirds of it borne by owners
Dimitrie calls interoperability a trap because it was treated as a technical problem. The government priced the problem twenty years ago and it has not been solved.
Source: NIST GCR 04-867, Cost Analysis of Inadequate Interoperability in the U.S. Capital Facilities Industry (2004) ↗Open source, for profit
Keeping software open while building a business on it.
The unexpected use cases
The uses of Speckle its founder never anticipated.
Questions for the whole table
The questions each stakeholder around the table needs answered.
The non-technical stakeholder
Serving the people who will never open a modeling tool.
Advice to PhD Dimitrie
What Dimitrie would tell himself before starting.
Everybody but the customer ends up owning their own data.
Dimitrie Stefanescu
Takeaways
Interoperability was treated as a technical problem when it was a trust problem. If my data is locked in a tool you do not have, no file format fixes the conversation.
When data is locked in a file you cannot query it. An owner with a hundred Revit files has a hundred locked boxes, and everybody but the customer ends up owning the customer's data.
The 3D FOMO era is over. The most useful near-term AI is understanding what is inside models, not generating fantasy spaces.
When data is locked in a file, the biggest thing that you lose is that it's very difficult for you to query.
Dimitrie Stefanescu