Carve Model at AIA26 in San Diego

Carve Model attended the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2026, held June 10–13 at the San Diego Convention Center.

The event brought together architects, designers, builders, manufacturers, and technology companies to exchange ideas about the changing practice of architecture.

Design is becoming more abundant

Across the conference, conversations addressed subjects including AI, new building technologies, sustainability, adaptive reuse, and the future of architectural practice.

For Carve, one question was especially relevant: as digital tools make it easier to generate, visualize, and revise design options, how do teams determine what should move forward?

More design possibilities do not automatically make decisions clearer. Architects still need to communicate scale, proportion, context, material relationships, and spatial intent to clients, consultants, approval agencies, investors, and the public.

Bringing design into a shared physical space

Drawings, renderings, BIM, and AI-generated images can each communicate important parts of a project. A physical model provides something different: a tangible object that people can examine together from multiple viewpoints.

Around a physical model, technical and nontechnical audiences can point to the same relationships, ask more specific questions, and develop a shared understanding of the proposal.

That does not make the physical model a replacement for digital design. It makes it a complementary form of evidence—one that can support evaluation, approval, presentation, and commitment.

What AIA26 reinforced for Carve

The conference reinforced the direction behind Carve Model: defining what a model needs to communicate before determining its scale, detail, materials, and finish.

As design production accelerates, physical verification can become more valuable—not because every idea needs to become a model, but because important decisions benefit from something people can understand together in real space.

We left San Diego encouraged by the conversations taking place across the profession and by the continuing role of physical models within increasingly digital design workflows.