At the recent International Built Environment Week (IBEW) in Singapore, industry leaders gathered to discuss the future of digital construction. During the “BIM Data Capture, Management & Exploitation” session, we explored a transformative new approach – one that shifts the focus from simply documenting a building to codifying the logic of how it’s made.
This approach addresses a fundamental question:
What if you could move from a project concept to a fully engineered, costed, and buildable solution in minutes instead of weeks?
Podium is the digital platform designed to make this a reality, transforming how we approach design and construction from the ground up. At its core is a powerful idea: to treat buildings as a “system of systems and parts,” capturing the entire construction process, not just the final product.
The Power of CUBS: A Data Model for the Real World
The engine driving the Podium platform is our:
Contextual Unified Building System (CUBS) data model. While today’s tools are excellent at documenting a building’s geometry and appearance the “what”, CUBS is designed to codify the crucial “how” – the rules, dependencies, and construction logic of its assembly.
CUBS is a multi-dimensional object model built to create a “golden thread” of data across the project lifecycle.
-
Deep Integration: It captures the complex relationships across architectural, structural, and MEPF domains in a bespoke hierarchical model.
-
Unified Data: It connects design logic directly to financial, supply chain, and product data within one unified model.
-
Open and Extensible: Designed to be an open standard, CUBS interoperates with existing industry frameworks like IFC.
By codifying the “how” this logic becomes a reusable, scalable, and computable asset that provides a foundation of data you can trust from design through to delivery planning.
From Orchestration to Choreography: A Smarter Approach
To harness the power of this rich data model, Podium uses inversion of control distributed, event-driven choreography.
While many computational design tools use a centralized “orchestration” approach, which can become a bottleneck as complexity grows, Podium’s choreography model is different. It uses independent “design agents” – expert automation systems encoded with deep engineering logic – that run in parallel. These agents respond to data, organically coordinating to solve design challenges without a central controller.
This shift from orchestration to choreography enables incredible scalability, flexibility, and cross-domain integration, turning concepts into fully detailed and buildable solutions with unprecedented speed.
Your Digital Platform for Real-World Results
This is not a future vision; Podium is a working software platform that developers and design teams are using today to achieve remarkable outcomes. By codifying the logic of construction, our design agents can generate engineered solutions in minutes.
With Podium, you can:
-
Achieve Unprecedented Speed: Go from a conceptual massing to schematic design with an engineered structural solution in minutes.
-
Design with Real-World Data: Integrate real supplier product catalogues, costs, and manufacturing constraints from the very beginning of the design process.
-
Deliver Coordinated Solutions: Automatically size plant rooms, allocate risers, and route services dynamically, ensuring that architectural, structural, and MEPF systems are coordinated in real-time.
Podium turns your design model into a true asset for engineered, buildable solutions that deliver certainty, economies of scale, and reduced rework.
Ready to build smarter, not just harder?
