“I was the product manager of Revit when it was going from prototype to global scale,” says Tatjana Dzambazova, director of AI Solutions and previously the Revit team lead at Autodesk. “It's been too long since the industry has actually been given a tool that both respects how the [design] profession has changed as well as leverages what this incredible, scary, wonderful technology [AI] can enable to finally bring back joy in architecture and not have it be a struggle.”

Motif Design's browser-based 3D modeling tool runs against a cloud back end, with live plan and 3D views. It can create parametric walls, doors, furniture and its interior design utility was a focus of the briefing ENR had with Dzambazova and Motif CTO Brian Mathews. 

Motif Design’s platform allows 2D and 3D quality checking performed at the same time and with changes to both dimensional views.
Image courtesy Motif, Inc.

"Too much time is spent working around the limitations of the current generation of software instead of advancing the design itself," says Shane Burger, chief technology officer at Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), in a statement. SOM tested the software and contributed to its development.

"I'm excited by Motif's vision for a new generation of tools that fuse AI and modeling in a collaborative environment, one where our teams spend their energy on design judgment rather than software workarounds, and deliver better buildings for our clients," Burger adds.

What ENR saw was inherent modeling capability that automatically writes changes in the model back to sheet sets and plans that are always with the user as he or she designs. The workflow that we saw encompasses several eras of CAD and BIM design and borrows from all of them.

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"If you think about the last major CAD tool, that was 30 years ago," Mathews explains. "We didn't have multi-threading. We didn't have the cloud. You didn't have GPUs and what they can do today. So if you just think of all the technology, you didn't have AI. You didn't have all these technology advances. This really is a ground-up new approach to BIM."

Mathews said coordinated drawings and modeling are just the backdrop of what Motif wants to deliver. 

"In this day and age, so much information's out on the internet, whether it's building codes, product specifications, what the weather and climate are for a particular region? I mean, there's so much that's outside of CAD," he says. "If you talk to people, that's where they spend a lot of their time, trying to get those answers."

The software has a boundary representation kernel—the engine of most CAD applications—and imported meshes for mathematical geometry can be brought in alongside it without forced conversion. Objects hold multiple representations, including representations such as door swings on a set of plans. Details exist at the platform level while model loading exists at the client and server level.

Motif's database can import information from other authoring tools. Original Revit or IFC schemas can be brought into it without loss. While they can't yet export back to Revit, the workflow is there for firms that still want to keep Revit. The platform borrows heavily from gaming technology as its data model uses composition rather than deep hierarchies. The agent does not sit outside of the data model. 

"Rhino is going to be here to stay. Revit will live for a long time,"  Dzambazo says. "What was important for us that we are totally agnostic on the type of models that can come in, can be from different engineers and different phases of a project."

Dzambazo said it can read IFC schemas but also allow users to edit and change the IFC class or the IFC elements and re-update it to both the model and plans in Motif.

What Motif has built is a BIM application that can use its own AI agents to automate the building of geometry for walls, furniture, finishes and other communly-used elements. An architecture firm's library of Revit objects that encompasses hundreds of gigabytes of commonly used floors, ceilings and walls could be made obsolete by a Motif Design AI that has gained the skills to model them for each project in a simple natural language prompt from that architect still working on her design while brainstorming what the interior space may need. 

"We're not building an MCP on top of something. We're not a add-on. We're building a full-fledged BIM,"
 Mathews said.