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 15 /Nov 11, 2025
Why BIM Light might be the missing layer in design tech
Jesper Wallgren, Finch
Nov 11, 2025 /Data, BIM & Interoperability
Why BIM Light might be the missing layer in design tech
Jesper Wallgren is an architect and the co-founder of Finch, a Stockholm startup whose software generates and edits floor plans in the browser. Finch began as a tool he built inside a five-person practice using Grasshopper. He speaks as someone who has sold software to architects while being one, which makes him precise about why most design tools fail them.
Jesper Wallgren, Architect & Co-Founder at Finch, Finch
In this conversation
How a homegrown Grasshopper tool in a small practice became a company once its prototype videos spread online.
Jesper's view that Revit was built as a documentation tool, and where a 'BIM-light' layer between sketch and model fits.
Why every building has an overall system and places where the rules must be broken, and what that demands of a generative tool.
His advice that trusting AI tools will feel like trusting skilled employees: you set direction and trust the craft.
When you're selling to architects, they are playing their CAD tool as an instrument.
Jesper Wallgren
Chapters
A five-architect practice builds a tool
How five architects built the tool they wished existed.
Why general 3D tools aren't enough
Why buildings are a specific modeling problem that general 3D software does not solve.
By the numbers
Share of design and construction professionals who have adopted BIM
Adoption has been flat at about 70 percent since 2018.
Jesper built Finch inside a five-person practice as a lighter layer under full BIM. Small firms are exactly where BIM adoption stalls.
Source: NBS Digital Construction Report 2023 ↗Designing with AI
How Jesper expects architects to design alongside AI.
The instrument and the button
The design principles behind a tool that stays out of the way.
What founders should look out for
What he would warn other founders about.
If you don't need to see the button right now, you should not see it.
Jesper Wallgren
Takeaways
Architects play their CAD tool like an instrument. Any new tool has to match that skill and speed, or they will not switch, no matter how clever the automation.
If you do not need to see the button right now, you should not see it. Finch is not the star of the project; the architect is.
Free users are polite. Paying users tell you the truth when the product does not work, so charge as early as you can.
If you give away for free people try to be nice, but when people have given you X amount of dollars then they will give you the truth.
Jesper Wallgren