The Future of Building Design - by Ari Porad

Complex Systems

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002: The Future of Building Design<br>We can design an entire buildings in a single day, and we absolutely should.

Ari Porad<br>Jun 11, 2026

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This is Part 1 of a series on the future of building. Subscribe to get Part 2 soon.<br>Disclosure: I used to work and currently consult for Reframe Systems, a software-driven modular construction company. All opinions are my own.<br>Building in America takes forever. Nationwide, the average new apartment building takes 28 months from start to finish. That goes up to 33 months in the Northeast and 48+ months in California. For comparison, the Empire State Building took only 20 months to design and build.<br>While construction in the United States is hardly the pinnacle of efficiency, it’s actually a minority of the total timeline: More than half (15 months on average) is spent in design and permit review. It’s hard to fully separate those two because permitting often requires 2-4 resubmittals with design changes each time, but a reasonable estimate is that design alone takes ~12 months.1<br>In addition to being generally frustrating, this lethargy makes housing more expensive: Eliminating 12 months of design time would reduce the total cost of each unit by at least 4.5%, and probably more (Table 3.9). It would also structurally de-risk development: The viability of a construction project is highly affected by local and national economic conditions, so every development project that begins today is a bet on the state of the economy 3 years from now. That sort of thing is famously hard to predict, and getting it wrong is a common way for developers to go bankrupt. Compensating for this risk requires a higher rate of return, which increases the overall cost of the project even more—and prevents many projects from being pursued at all.<br>Our inability to build cost-effective housing is suffocating America. For a deep dive on the topic, I highly recommend Abundance. For now, I’ll just highlight this recent study which estimated that if housing costs had stayed constant between 1990 and 2020, 11% more children (13 million) would have been born in that time and 51% of the fertility drop in the 2010s could have been avoided. This is just one impact of many, but a good illustration of why we desperately need to figure out how to build better.<br>Future posts in this series will talk about how we can improve other aspects of the construction process, but for now let’s talk about design: Every building needs some amount of design—you’ve got to decide what to build and what it’s going to look like—but a full year is comically inefficient. The vast majority of buildings2 are made of the same components put together in similar ways. Beneath the finishes and floor plans, everything is just wood and sheetrock or steel and concrete. At a higher level, many design decisions are forced by code requirements or standard guidelines (like not having a line of sight into the bathroom).<br>We treat every building as a bespoke prototype, to be hand-crafted by skilled experts—and we pay for it. There is real artistry in architecture, but only when there’s budget to build something beautiful. Exorbitant construction costs suck up any available money and then some, leaving us with the hideous 5-over-1 boxes that have come to define apartments built in this century. We need a wholesale re-imagination of the building design process, using modern technology to do in an instant what now takes a year.<br>One-Click Permit Set

Fully automating the process from design concept to permit set would be difficult, but there’s no reason it can’t be done. Given a design concept—massing, floor plan, finishes, site information—everything else can be generated automatically:<br>Massing & Floor Plan: Use a simplified version of existing 2D/3D BIM tools that intelligently constrain to buildable, code-compliant, norm-compliant solutions.

Architectural Details: Start with a reasonable default, and allow modifications as needed.

Structural: Gravity design is mostly deterministic rule application: calculate the floor load, size the beam to match, repeat recursively. Depending on the site and design, other aspects—like the lateral system—might require high-level human judgment as an input to the solver. The structural system will also require a geotechnical report for soil information as input.<br>Unlike architecture, you can conclusively prove whether a proposed structural design meets code requirements. This enables different approaches, like training an ML model to propose efficient designs. Because you can check the output each time, you’re not relying on ML for safety.

Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, and Fire Protection (MEPF): Outlets, sprinklers, and vents are generally placed systematically based on code requirements and heuristics. Plumbing fixture locations are obviously more specific, and are naturally part of the design input. Given those locations,...