In Conversation with Aiprentice's Ethan Wei on Preserving Architectural Knowledge Through Data

“Today, architects are doing more than their previous generation – smaller teams doing more work, handling more responsibilities, and interacting with more groups,” reflects Ethan Wei, founder of Aiprentice, a construction tech startup reimagining how architectural firms manage and leverage their design data. This observation cuts to the heart of a growing challenge in modern architecture: balancing creative vision with practical execution.

From Brain Science to Building Science

Wei’s journey to construction tech is anything but conventional. With a PhD in neuroscience and a background in software development, he might seem an unlikely candidate to revolutionize architectural workflows. However, it was his marriage to an architect that opened his eyes to the industry’s pressing challenges.

“My wife would put in all-nighters near project deadlines,” Wei recounts. “As architects, it’s very hard to put a stop on things you are creating. It’s like art creation – you can spend as long as you want if there weren’t budget or project time limits.”

This personal insight led Wei to identify a fundamental challenge in architectural practice: the profession’s creative nature makes it difficult to put firm boundaries on the work. The reception to technological solutions in architecture reflects this creative-practical tension. “There are people who are very receptive and looking for tools like this,” Wei notes. “There are people who may not see the immediate benefits or miss the risk of opening up access to their past creations as data.” Some architects prefer starting from scratch, viewing it as more creatively pure – a preference Wei respects while recognizing the practical demands of modern practice.

The Data-Driven Solution

After several iterations and prototypes, Wei and his team at Aiprentice developed a platform that treats construction documentation as data rather than just drawings. This shift in perspective opened new possibilities for efficiency and knowledge preservation.

“Construction documentation is perhaps the most complex contract document in the world,” Wei explains. “As firms move to BIM and generate deliverables, the models become very monolithic – big piles of data created inside proprietary formats.” The platform leverages APIs provided by industry standard software like Autodesk to give architects access to their historical design data when they need it, without being bound to traditional user interfaces.

This approach delivers multiple benefits for architectural firms. Most immediately, it helps teams work more efficiently with complex documentation. But perhaps more importantly, it preserves institutional knowledge as team members come and go. “When people move on, they leave with their knowledge,” Wei notes. “But without a good way to access and understand these past design solutions, newcomers to the firm would not be able to learn from or build upon that knowledge.”

This capability becomes particularly valuable given the gap between architectural education and practice. “Architecture schools don’t usually talk about constructability so much,” Wei observes. “They treat the topic more like creation or the artistic side. But when you move to practice, you have to solve problems for construction.”

The Future of Architectural Documentation

Wei envisions a future where AI transforms the documentation process itself. “In the future, construction documentation needs to be more automated and more like building software, where architects would be like developers,” he explains. Just as software developers have compilers that automatically translate their code into executable programs, Wei envisions a future where AI systems could take architects’ creative designs and automatically ‘compile’ them into proper construction documentation that conforms to code and constructability requirements.

This vision could dramatically reduce the current burden where “close to half of the building process goes to making construction documentation,” potentially allowing architects more freedom to iterate on their designs without being constrained by documentation overhead.

Looking Ahead

As the construction industry evolves with new materials and methods, Wei sees AI and data-driven automation playing an increasingly important role. Aiprentice is already working on features where AI analyzes historical design data to automate documentation tasks for architects.

In an era where smaller architectural teams are taking on more work than ever before, tools like Aiprentice suggest a future where technology helps bridge the gap between creative vision and practical execution. By automating the more systematic aspects of documentation while preserving institutional knowledge, these innovations could help architectural teams focus more on design innovation while ensuring their visions can be efficiently translated into buildable reality – a crucial evolution for an industry where smaller teams increasingly need to do more with less.