Architectural models finally come to the browser

FastCompany: When the collaborative design software company Figma launched its public beta in 2016, its browser-based web and interface design tools were a quick hit, putting the startup head to head with the dominant design software company of the day, Adobe. The premise and the interface were so simple, Figma soon became a go-to tool for designers . The building design software startup Motif wants to do the same thing for architectural models. Through its platform, architects and builders across a project team can design and visualize buildings, and then collaboratively review and augment their designs, all online.

[Image: Motif] Motif Design is a newly launched platform that is seeking to take on the established software tools of the architecture, engineering, and construction industries by making them more user-friendly and collaborative. The cofounder and CEO, Amar Hanspal, says the software that these industries rely on has for too long been overly complex and frustratingly difficult to use. Motif Design, he says, offers a new way , making it possible for even highly complex building models to be worked on simultaneously in real time by different teams. “By making it browser based, we are making it very accessible.

One of the challenges of the old stack has been that it’s very difficult to use, it’s inaccessible, stuff runs on only PCs,” he says. Most modeling currently happens within the walled realm of software tools, where updates by one user have to be saved before others can make their own changes, individual files constantly being checked out and then remerged back in. Motif is taking the model-building tasks that are the core of architectural practice and allowing them to happen smoothly online, across the many teams that use them, running on a live database capable of recording every change to a model as it happens.

“Just like Figma did with the design stack,” Hanspal says. [Image: Motif] Motif Design complements Motif Review, a browser-based collaborative workspace launched in 2025, which designers can use to present, visualize, mark up, and gather feedback on models in real time. Motif Design now allows users to build those complex models from scratch, all within the shareable, accessible space of a web browser. “That is hard to do because buildings have an enormous amount of data and browsers have memory limitations,” Hanspal says.

“Only recently could a browser run the math fast enough for someone to work in the model rather than just look at it.” Hanspal understands the challenge of dealing with big architectural models. He’s a former co-CEO and chief product officer at Autodesk, the $7 billion company behind industry standard software like AutoCAD and Revit.

Before leaving Autodesk in 2016, he spent two decades helping the architecture, engineering, and construction industries streamline their work with building information modeling (BIM), an approach that relies on massive 3D models of building projects that can be accessed by the many teams involved in turning the design to reality. [Image: Motif] By the turn of the century, BIM had pushed the industries irreversibly past the days of hand drawings and paper documents. “It combined geometry with the database,” Hanspal says. “So not only did things look real, but . . .

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The introduction of a browser-based platform for architectural modeling represents a significant advancement in the industry, particularly with its focus on collaboration and AI integration, making it highly relevant to brand strategy professionals in tech and design.