Founded by Oliver Thomas, the ATN Summit is the first flagship conference of the Archi-Tech Network, marking five years since the platform began as a grassroots initiative to share real-world architectural knowledge. Taking place on March 18–19, 2026, in London, the ATN Summit brings together architects, technologists, and industry innovators to explore how emerging technologies are reshaping architectural practice. Designed as a high-production, ideas-driven event, the Summit reflects ATN's evolution from an informal online conversation into a global platform actively engaging with the future of the built environment.
The ATN Summit marks a significant moment for Archi-Tech Network, translating five years of online discourse into a physical gathering of the global AEC community. The conference represents the culmination of a journey that began not as a formal institution, but as a response to growing frustration with how architectural knowledge is shared, taught, and accessed.
Archi-Tech Network was founded in 2021 by Oliver Thomas while he was working at Bjarke Ingels Group. At the time, Thomas observed a widening gap between architectural education and professional practice, particularly in relation to technology. While leading firms were rapidly developing advanced digital workflows internally, much of this knowledge remained inaccessible to students and early-career architects. At the same time, online tutorials were often disconnected from real-world practice, offering simplified or misleading representations of how architecture is actually produced.
ATN began as a live podcast hosted on Clubhouse during the pandemic, bringing together practicing architects to speak candidly about workflows, tools, and career paths. What started as informal conversations quickly gained traction, revealing a global appetite for transparent, experience-led knowledge. Over the following years, the platform expanded to YouTube, live talks, behind-the-scenes studio tours, and highly popular Pecha Kucha events in London and beyond, gradually forming an international community around architecture, technology, and emerging modes of practice.
ATN's Archi-Tech Tours offered rare access inside globally recognized practices, while its talks, events, and courses increasingly focused on deeper questions: how technology changes authorship, how firms scale innovation, and how architects can remain relevant in a rapidly shifting industry. These conversations—both online and in person—consistently pointed to the same conclusion: the industry needed a physical space for deeper, collective reflection.
Rather than replicating traditional architectural conferences, the ATN Summit was conceived as a space structured around concise and high-quality talks, each one focused on a single, clear idea. Speakers are invited to inspire through vision, educate through lived experience, challenge existing norms, or reflect through personal stories. Portfolio presentations, sales pitches, and superficial trend narratives are deliberately excluded in favor of substance and critique.
The Summit will be held at Protein Studios in Shoreditch, London, and will host approximately 350–400 attendees across two continuous days of talks. The audience is expected to include architects, designers, technology specialists, AEC entrepreneurs, and investors. Discussions will span a broad range of topics, including architecture, digital technology, BIM, computational design, artificial intelligence, immersive environments, and modern methods of construction. Rather than operating through parallel tracks, each day is designed as a shared experience, encouraging collective focus and sustained discussion across the entire audience.
In the lead-up to the event, ATN will host a structured program of free online workshops developed in collaboration with leading architecture practices and technology partners. These sessions are designed as practice-led learning environments, where participants engage directly with real workflows, tools, and ways of thinking used within major studios. The workshop program includes sessions led by teams from Bjarke Ingels Group, Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, HENN, and Kohn Pedersen Fox, alongside a collaborative hackathon hosted by Heatherwick Studio. Together, these initiatives extend ATN's long-standing emphasis on experimentation, transparency, and shared learning, while building a clear narrative arc toward the Summit. In this sense, the conference is not conceived as an isolated event, but as the focal point of a broader, multi-month process of professional engagement.
More broadly, the ATN Summit aims to reflect a pivotal moment for the architectural profession. Despite its cultural influence, architecture has seen limited productivity gains over recent decades. At the same time, advances in automation, computation, and artificial intelligence present both opportunity and uncertainty. For Archi-Tech Network, the Summit is not about celebrating technology uncritically, but about creating a forum in which architects can engage with these changes thoughtfully, critically, and collectively.
Five years after its beginnings as a small online conversation, Archi-Tech Network's first Summit represents a natural evolution of its mission. By bringing together those actively shaping the future of practice, the ATN Summit positions itself as a new kind of architectural conference—one grounded in experience, driven by ideas, and focused on what comes next.
