Revit is relational, but shy about relationships?
A new AI based tool based on 'the building graph'?
It has always baffled me that Revit—which was built around objects and relationships—has almost no exposure of those relationships in its modelling environment:
- Where is the model element tree?
- Open a DWF or IFC export and it is there, but in Revit without third-party tools?
- Where is 'the Brain' or mind map like exposure of those relationships?
- Why are family constraints so poorly expressed?
- Why are the relational parameter and function build environment so crude?
I've long wondered about this, but this post was prompted by seeing Marko's LinkedIn post. "A building is a graph": a set of object relationships that connects elements which become spatial experience.
Maybe it is time for a tool that captures all that?
A building is a graph. I know because I carried one in my head for 11 years: this wall hosts that duct, this room drains to that riser, this beam carries that slab. Every architect runs that model… | 🏗️ Marko Lazic
A building is a graph. I know because I carried one in my head for 11 years: this wall hosts that duct, this room drains to that riser, this beam carries that slab. Every architect runs that model. The software never did. Our tools shattered the graph into files. Geometry in one, structure in another, quantities in a third. The relationships, the actual building, survive nowhere; they retire with whoever held them. That’s why handovers leak. You can’t export what was never connected. Even the file company is conceding the point. Autodesk’s newest building API speaks GraphQL, serves elements instead of files, and their own strategy blog is titled “from files to data.” Now the part everyone building AEC software underprices. A building lives 50, 80, 100 years. No tool survives that long; formats and vendors churn every decade. The one thing that must outlive them all is the graph: every relationship in the building, queryable, for its whole life. Tools get replaced. Features converge. The graph compounds. Most AEC software adds features to files. Whoever builds the graph builds the thing every future tool plugs into. I held the graph for 11 years, for free. Someone is about to get paid for it.
🏗️ Marko Lazic
The LinkedIn post that prompted me to write this
buildOS: Design buildings your way!
Agent platform for architects. Insider, Gen, Tender. Built on buildOS.
"For 30+ years, you adapted to the software. Now the software adapts to your flow, because no two are the same."
