Christopher’s work challenges long-standing assumptions about BIM performance, interoperability, and extensibility. He is developing next-generation design tools that allow AEC professionals to query, transform, and visualize billions of data points across multi-gigabyte BIM models in real time.
While industries such as gaming and data engineering have embraced high-performance computing and real-time systems architecture, AEC workflows have largely remained constrained by legacy software paradigms. Christopher applies modern systems design principles to rethink how building information is structured, processed, and visualized.
Drawing on 30 years of experience across software engineering, programming language design, and large-scale systems architecture, he is building desktop software and services for the AEC industry that fundamentally expand what practitioners can expect from their tools.
Over his career, Christopher has authored peer-reviewed journal articles, designed and implemented multiple programming languages, worked at Autodesk and Microsoft, taught computer science at the university level, and spoken internationally on generative design, data-flow systems, and software engineering.
The AEC industry has quietly accepted a difficult bargain: hand BIM data to cloud platforms, then pay to store it, move it, access it, process it, and wait on rate-limited APIs when it is needed at scale. This model only works when the underlying systems are optimized for bulk access, analytics, automation, and AI. Too often, they are not. This talk explores the hidden costs of vendor-controlled BIM data access and presents a practical alternative: customer-controlled data infrastructure built on open schemas, efficient columnar storage, and fast query engines. We will show how BIM Open Schema and BIM Lakehouse can make building data faster to access, easier to integrate, cheaper to operate, and more useful across applications, portfolios, and AI workflows.
AI is making it easier than ever for AEC firms to create custom tools, scripts, and applications, but generated software is only as portable and capable as the libraries it builds on. Too often, AEC development starts inside proprietary host application SDKs, creating hidden constraints around licensing, deployment, reuse, and long-term maintainability. This talk introduces the open Ara 3D SDK: a portable, dependency-free C# foundation for building geometry, data, visualization, and workflow tools that are not locked to a single platform. We will demonstrate how Ara 3D Studio can be used as a practical environment for developing and testing workflows that can later run in standalone tools, internal applications, or other 3D software environments.
