🌐 The Master Builder Returns: Augmenta Designs Waste Out of Construction

One of my favorite books of all time is Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. It’s about the building of a cathedral in medieval England. Tom Builder is a master stonemason whose life ambition is to design and build one of the great cathedrals of the age.

The master builder had to hold the entire project in his head: the design, the stone, the structure, the sequence of work, the people, the tradeoffs.

For a long time, that was possible. Buildings were complicated, but an exceptional professional could see how everything fit together.

I highly recommend the book, but quite obviously, that is no longer how construction works.

A modern commercial building contains hundreds of thousands of physical components across electrical, mechanical, plumbing, structural, and fire protection systems — far too much information for any one person to hold in their head.

Every building you’ve been in was designed and engineered one way, then built another.

The architect has a vision. The engineer turns that vision into schematics — documents that show what the building is supposed to do and how it should perform.

But those schematics do not adequately answer the most practical question in construction:

Where does everything actually go?

That’s because there’s only so much room in a wall.

A modern commercial building has electrical, plumbing, mechanical, structural, and fire protection systems all competing for the same ceilings, shafts, risers, walls, and underground space.

Which means construction today is often a zero-sum game.

Some trades win. Some trades lose. The original design gets redesigned on the fly.

It’s a broken process that the industry treats as normal. But it creates enormous cost and waste. Up to 30% of construction materials can end up in landfills.

Augmenta is built around an absurdly overdue idea: constructability should be solved before construction starts.

The company uses spatial AI to turn architectural models, engineering requirements, and project constraints into 3D designs that show what can actually be built before the work begins.

As requirements change, the model changes. Systems move. Tradeoffs become visible before they become expensive mistakes in the field.

My Supercool guest this week is Francesco “Frio” Iorio, co-founder and CEO of Augmenta.

Before founding the company, he ran computational science research at Autodesk, where he helped pioneer generative design. Before that, he worked in IBM’s high-performance computing group.

Frio has spent his career teaching machines to see complexity that humans can’t.

What he’s building now is a way to give construction back something the master builder once provided:

The ability to see the whole project before the first wall goes up.

Here’s what stood out from our conversation.

Today’s design software is still mostly a drawing board.

“Even today, the state of the art that architects, engineers, and contractors use to design these buildings is a very powerful but glorified drawing board. It’s an electronic drawing board. It is no more than that. As powerful as it is, none of the so-called computer-aided design software and systems and tools design on your behalf. They help you document the design you have in your head, but none of them actually help you design.”

The drawings get tossed, then rebuilt.

“All the data, all the schematics, all the blueprints that the engineers create are completely tossed away, and the contractors remake them effectively from scratch, if not from scratch, close. Specifically because it is their job to make sure that everything actually fits.”

There’s only so much room in a wall.

“Sometimes contractors design and do the final physical design, and a shaft or a riser turns out to be too small and literally doesn’t fit into the building. And so they have to go back to the structural engineer and say, ‘Well, I need a larger opening.’ And then they have to go back to the architect. ‘Well, actually, if we need to make this opening larger, then we’ll lose walkable space on this floor.’ And then they go to the owner.”

When the mistake shows up in the field, it is already too late.

“When these errors are found out, it’s way, way too late. And therefore you have to tear it down, throw it away, build it again. And that’s also when people are more prone to get hurt.”

Augmenta shows where everything actually goes.

“Our direction is to become that digital thread, that translator that takes this high-level conceptual intent into a design, like a 3D map — a full map of all the construction materials that are actually required and the map that tells you where to install all of them.”

AI lets teams test the options they never have time to test.

“Not only does it allow you to obtain a design more quickly, but it also allows you to experiment with all sorts of what-if scenarios that would be impossible to do in a given amount of time. That’s really something that architects, especially engineers, really like — having a compressed time where they can explore all these possibilities and offer to their clients a variety of options depending on what they privilege.”

The point is not speed for its own sake. It is better to make choices before the job site has to live with them.

The first proof point was not a skyscraper. It was a school.

“Tip-of-the-spear buildings have the budget and the resources to be optimized. Whereas you can imagine the budgetary and scheduling situation for a public elementary school in rural Michigan. That happened to be the first-ever building with a mission-critical part of the infrastructure being designed by the AI.”

“In that school alone, which is not a colossal building, they measured around 15% less waste.”

Bad HVAC design locks in higher energy use for decades.

“For mechanical systems — HVAC, heating, cooling, and ventilation — the design of those systems is very much affecting the operational costs because the energy used to run the heating, cooling, and ventilation systems is largely affected by how big the equipment is and the actual design of the ducts that take the airflow around the building.”

Electrical design is Augmenta’s entry point into construction. Mechanical design is where the company will start to change how much energy a building uses (or doesn't) for decades.f

The building changes as the conversation changes.

“Imagine a room where a group of stakeholders sits around, and there’s a panel or a hologram that always represents the building — but it’s the real building. It’s not a sketch or a hypothesis. It is exactly what you can build. There’s a bill of materials. There’s a schedule. Everything that you need. As the conversation between the stakeholders provides more information or presents a hypothesis, the building changes in real time.”

“Where the sustainability and the operational effectiveness are not an afterthought, it’s not something that gets designed in eventually, or if there’s enough time, but it’s there by default.”

Supercool Takeaway

Construction has treated field improvisation as normal. Augmenta is betting it should be eliminated. By moving constructability to the beginning of the process, the company helps teams catch conflicts before they become rework, waste, delays, or costs.

Operator Takeaways

Make the plan useful to the people doing the work. Augmenta turns architectural models and engineering requirements into instructions a contractor can actually build from — what materials are needed, where they go, and how every system fits.

Solve the conflict before anyone orders the material. A conflict in a model is a design change. A conflict on site is crews waiting, materials wasted, and schedules slipping.

Start with the system that's hardest to get right.
Augmenta began with electrical because it's one of the hardest parts of a building to route correctly. Getting that right opens the path to mechanical, where better design reduces energy use throughout the building's life.

This Week’s Podcast Episode:

The Master Builder Returns: Augmenta Designs Waste Out of Construction

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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