Manifesto

Development of Revit began in 1997. Vectorworks was born in 1985, Archicad in 1984, and AutoCAD in 1977, the same year earthlings first saw binary suns set on Tatooine.

The fundamental architecture of these applications was designed in a pre-internet, pre-cloud, pre-remote era, and yet they still dominate the AEC industry today. We use these tools not because we love them, but because we have no other choice.

We have spent too much time wrestling with antiquated software that is expensive to license, frustrating to learn, and tedious to use. These tools have tried our patience, constrained the way we work, and drained too much of the joy from architecture.

We need software for a modern workflow, designed from the ground up for collaboration, structured data, and artificial intelligence, and built on a modern technology stack. Above all, we deserve software that reconnects us with the simple joy of designing, iterating, and creating.

So we decided to ask a different question.

What would professional architectural software look like if we designed it today?

Stop and ask yourself this question, in earnest. If you could start over, completely, without the mental or physical baggage of what exists today, what would you want? It's 2026. Nothing is impossible. If you can dream it, we can build it. Tell us everything.

As we diligently interview professionals within architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) across six continents, we'll share with you the biggest pain points we are witnessing and the most promising themes that are emerging. This is only worth building if we build something we love.

Go big or go home.

Architects should be able to architect.

Architecture begins with seeing. With a line on paper. With proportion, precedent, place, material, memory, culture and intuition. With a person working through an idea. Somewhere along the way, our tools stopped serving that process and began dictating it. We learned the menus, parameters, families, templates, matrices, ribbons and dialog boxes. We learned the workarounds. We built entire professions around administering the software. Eventually, an entire industry began treating these constraints as reality. They are not reality. They are decisions somebody made decades ago. We can make different ones.

Don't start with what's possible.

Architecture school teaches you to push an idea beyond what seems reasonable and then refine it until it becomes real. We think software deserves the same ambition. If we begin with today's constraints, we'll end up with a better version of today's tools. We want to begin much further out, with the way architecture could be made if the assumptions of the last fifty years disappeared. Then we'll do the hard work of bringing that idea back to earth.

Not another button on the ribbon.

Most new architecture software accepts the old paradigm and builds around it. A better feature. A smarter plugin. An AI assistant. Another button on the ribbon. Corvus starts from a fundamentally different premise: the old paradigm itself is the problem. We are not building another layer on top of yesterday's software, and we are not interested in recreating old systems with newer technology. We are starting over.

Back to first principles.

What is a drawing? What does an architect actually need to express? How does an idea move from a sketch to geometry, from geometry to information, and from information to something another human being can understand and ultimately build? What would architecture software become if we started with those questions instead of the conventions of existing software? The answers may take longer to build. That's okay. Some things are worth doing right.

Meet designers where they think.

Architects spend years learning to see space, proportion, pattern, context and relationships. Then we ask them to sit down at a computer and think the way their software thinks. It should be the other way around. The computer should meet designers where they already think. Drawing should feel like drawing. Modeling should feel like modeling. Information should appear when it is useful rather than becoming something the designer has to administer. Two dimensions and three dimensions should be different expressions of the same thought, not separate worlds held together by machinery.

Amplify the architect.

AI changes what is possible, but it shouldn't change who is in charge. The future of architecture isn't typing a sentence and receiving an averaged image of a building you never really designed. AI should amplify authorship, not erase it. A sketch can carry geometry. A line can carry scale. A drawing can carry context. A building can carry the history, climate, language and culture of its place. Intelligent software should understand more and more of that while leaving the architect exactly where they belong: at the center of the creative act.

Small design isn't small.

Architecture isn't only airports, towers and megaprojects. It's the kitchen someone walks into every morning. The window placed for a particular view. The threshold you cross every day. The staircase somebody obsessed over. The five-sixteenths of an inch that nobody else noticed but the architect knew mattered. Much of the built world is shaped by independent architects and small practices who understand the climate, history, culture, language and people of the places where they work. Their work affects ordinary life every single day. They deserve extraordinary tools.

Build for how people actually work.

Sometimes architects work alone. Sometimes together. Sometimes on paper. Sometimes on a computer. Sometimes they need extraordinary precision; sometimes they need somewhere to put the first uncertain line. Sometimes they want a collaborator looking over their shoulder; sometimes they want everyone to leave them alone. Software should accommodate that reality rather than impose an imaginary workflow in which everyone is perpetually connected, collaborating and administering a perfect information model. Build for how people work, not how they're supposed to work.

Complexity is not sophistication.

Powerful software does not have to announce its power with ribbons, matrices, settings, gizmos and dialogue boxes. Sophistication can feel simple. The complexity belongs inside the system, not in front of the person trying to design. Corvus should be powerful without becoming bureaucratic, intelligent without becoming presumptuous, precise without becoming rigid. When you're thinking, it should get out of the way. When you need it, it should be there.

Make designing joyful again.

There is something deeply wrong with a profession full of people who love architecture but hate the tools they spend their lives using. Sketching can be joyful. Modeling can be joyful. Working through a difficult idea can be joyful. Why should that feeling disappear the moment the computer comes out? We want architects to experience software the way they experience a great pencil, pen or model-making tool: something that makes them want to create. Forrest asked a wonderfully simple question: When do you see somebody smiling using Revit? We think architects should smile when they use Corvus.

We haven't given up.

The systems architects use today were invented by people. They aren't laws of nature. They can be questioned, dismantled and reinvented. An industry may have resigned itself to the idea that this is simply how architecture software works. We haven't. We still believe drawing matters. We still believe thinking matters. We still believe craft matters. We still believe details matter. We still believe the architect should remain the author of the work. And we believe architecture deserves tools worthy of the people who practice it.

Yup, it's personal.

We're not building Corvus because someone identified an attractive software category to go build a unicorn. We're building it because we've lived this problem. We've watched extraordinary designers contort themselves around mediocre tools. We've watched an industry confuse knowing software with knowing architecture. We've watched technology promise to liberate architects while increasingly asking them to surrender the very act of designing. We don't accept that future. We want these tools for ourselves, for the architects we know, and for the generation that shouldn't have to inherit the compromises we did. We're going to build them because we believe architecture can be better when architects are free to architect.

It's personal.

Join our waitlist.

You’ve already waited 49 years. What’s another two? AEC professionals have spent decades jumping through hoops and creating workarounds for convoluted software. No one dares to build something that will challenge the status quo. It's time for something fundamentally different and unapologetically human. Join the waitlist.