Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to David Campion and Asli Timur of Caribbean architectural firm ARGO Development Studio about new technologies as a method of improving resilience and sustainability. Written by Glen Westall.

ARGO Development Studio is an architectural firm with an unusually broad footprint for a practice with its roots in the Caribbean. Founded 15 years ago, the
company specializes in digital construction, climate intelligence, and modern methods
of construction, drawing on a team of architects, master planners, interior designers, and architectural technologists spread across the world. Founder, David Campion, describes the firm’s origins:

 “We are an architectural practice specializing in digital construction, climate intelligence and modern methods of construction. We started our first office in Barbados back in 2013, then we sort of grew from there to other Caribbean islands. At the moment we have offices in four Caribbean islands as well as an office in Dublin, Ireland, and one more in Malaga. There are also procurement offices in Malaga, Spain, and New York, USA and procurement base in Nanjing. Miami office is opening soon.

“What’s important for us is that among our 40-strong staff, we’ve got a great degree of diversity. They include specialists in everything from master planning and interior design through to architectural technologists and administration staff. Furthermore, about among our staff, we have 16 different nationalities. We always feel it’s our staff’s diversity that helps us create a very unique response to a client’s brief and helps us to maximize our creativity and innovation through design and architecture.”

Collaboration Across Time Zones

ARGO’s approach to collaboration is built on a digital-first foundation, one that allows the practice to operate coherently across its geographically dispersed network of consultants and specialists. Campion explains the role of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in making that possible:

“The foundation for our collaboration is digital construction. By using BIM, it allows us to collaborate with consultants all over the world, including our own team, which is quite geographically spread. So when we’re dealing with specialists and consultants in different parts of the world and different time zones, being able to work off the same model or ‘digital twin’, as we like to refer to our models, makes the process collaborative and efficient.

“It allows us to clash detect between architecture and civil and structural components, MEP components, more specialist components of interiors and other various disciplines so that we can have a fully federated digital twin model that we can clash detect and refine to ensure that, by the time the project gets to site, it’s informing a very efficient delivery.”

Lessons from Hurricane Maria

The single event that shaped ARGO Development Studio’s environmental direction most profoundly was not a policy shift or a client brief but a natural disaster. In 2017, Hurricane Maria struck the island of Dominica with devastating force, and Mr. Campion was among the first outside observers to reach the island after the storm.

“If you recall, back in 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the island of Dominica and had a catastrophic impact,” the Director says. “I was asked to go into the island as soon as it was possible again. So within, I think, a week of the hurricane hitting, I visited Dominica and the devastation left quite an impression on me. From that point, Asli and I started up our Climate Intelligence Unit. The whole idea of the Climate Intelligence Unit is to work very closely with our clients to accelerate a movement towards net zero architecture and development.

“The damage of Maria, which was from 175 miles an hour winds back then, well those winds are now increasing regularly to 185 miles an hour and higher. If you look at the recent hurricane that passed Jamaica, Melissa, that topped out at 185mph. We knew that we had to change how we thought about architecture and development from ARGO’s perspective, and climate intelligence became a very important anchor point when responding to a client brief.

“We brought this intelligence through digital modeling to analyze a site’s location and environmental challenges. Our analysis included simulating storm surges over the next 100 years and historic flood levels in the area. That helps us identify how best to position buildings in their locations and also to simulate natural disaster events, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, and what impact that has on the site and how we design with those in mind so that we create resilient architecture.”

AI, a Force For Good

ARGO Development Studio makes use of artificial intelligence to accelerate both its climate intelligence work and its wider design process. Ms. Timur, co-founder and head of the climate intelligence unit, explains how the firm is deploying the technology:

Our design process starts with understanding our clients needs, project scope, and budget. We then gain an understanding of the location and its climate, collecting scientific data and researching passive strategies accordingly. We begin the BIM process by energy modeling to understand elements such as carbon footprint, energy efficiency, and solar radiation. We compare real-world scenarios by using our sustainability tools and calculations that incorporate climate- based benefits, energy efficiency, flexibility of design and your budget to exactly measure the benefit to both you and the climate.

We take climate analysis extremely seriously, and our Climate Intelligence Unit plays a key role in our design process. The Climate Intelligence Unit actively works with hurricane patterns, sea-level rise, flooding risks, and extreme heat scenarios, using AI-driven climate modeling and historical data to inform our designs, supported by tools such as Rhino, Grasshopper, Ladybug, Honeybee, and Climate Consultant. Utilizing AI and BIM technology, we can simulate the best optimal solution for each project and for each client’s needs.

There is also a second strand of AI integration that is transforming how the studio communicates visual concepts to clients.

“We are also integrating AI by having an open source model, which empowers our teams to conduct in-depth design iterations with the precision of the modeling,” Ms. Timur says. “By using our models and our parameters with it, we can easily switch the materials of the models and have it rendered easily and in a couple of seconds by using AI. We include this ARGO concept workflow, enabling us to create comprehensive analysis and simulation capabilities. We gain time while doing this. Instead of changing manually, we use AI in the concept design process and we can update our models, materials, the visuals according to the client’s unique needs at a much faster pace.”

The Road Ahead

If climate intelligence addresses the resilience of buildings in a warming world, ARGO’s approach to cost management ensures that ambition never outpaces budget. A process the studio calls dynamic costing sits at the heart of how it keeps architecture accountable throughout the design journey.

“There’s a process called dynamic costing and because now we’re dealing with projects all over the world, we’re implementing that for better results,” Mr. Campion explains. “Clients have their specific brief and there are certain elements to those briefs that are consistent from client to client, location to location. That’s typically controlling cost, controlling program, controlling the creation of award- winning architecture. So it’s very important as architects that we tackle those early on with clients.

“Dynamic costing allows us to do that because it allows us to create a model with parameters that we control and that allow us to quantify with great accuracy, which will inform the bill of quantities that traditionally a quantity surveyor would do. It’s certainly not replacing a quantity surveyor but it’s making the process a lot more efficient and more interactive, and it’s happening in real time, just like with AI. So when our architects are designing and they’re deciding a ceiling level is 12 foot or 11 foot six, they will see the cost implications in real time as they design.

For Campion, this seamless connection between design creativity and financial reality is the direction the entire industry needs to travel. It points to an integrated, intelligence- driven model of architecture that will define the studio’s work going forward.

“It helps us as architects stay in tune with the client’s budget ambitions and it allows us to very efficiently and effectively communicate the components that make up the building. We can then communicate those in a very organized, scheduled manner back to the traditional quantity surveyor who can then work their magic with all that intelligence information.

“That way they can do what is necessary to make sure that all that intelligence we’re passing over from the digital twin through dynamic costing is used to inform the building, the materials we use, and the budget ambitions and costs. Harnessing these types of developing technologies will be crucial to our work into the future as well as that of the industry as a whole.”