Continuous Intelligence for the Built Environment.

My interest in the built environment began in the summer of 2023 during a record breaking heatwave in a region thousands of miles from my home in New Hampshire.

I had read about Phoenix, Arizona reaching 31 consecutive days at or above 110°F and the hundreds of heat related deaths that resulted.

Years of physical development patterns and infrastructure decisions had altered how people experienced heat and who was most vulnerable to it. Phoenix had not caused the heatwave, but it had changed what that heatwave became.

This news story became the catalyst for what would become a fascination with the built environment and environmental justice for the coming years, and became the basis for a school policy brief proposing a municipal green bond to fund sustainable infrastructure interventions aimed at reducing the urban heat island effect.

During that research I came across the U.S. Green Building Council for the first time and started attending webinars in my free time. At first I was drawn to sustainable urban infrastructure itself, but over time I became more interested in what was underneath it. Many of the existing problems within construction planning didn't seem to come from a lack of knowledge or effort, as people often already knew what good outcomes looked like. The challenge seemed to be getting the right information in front of the right people early enough for it to influence decisions.

That question followed me into my senior year of high school and eventually became a research paper proposing what was then called the Carbon Negative Building Planner, an early concept that would later evolve into Siloplot.

At the time I approached the problem through sustainability and Circular Economy principles, trying to understand how project teams could connect early decisions to downstream outcomes across carbon, cost, incentives, and project conditions before those decisions became expensive to reverse.

I also became interested in frameworks like Activity Location Material Flow Analysis (AL-MFA), adapting parts of its structure to think about projects through dimensions of quantity, time, activity, and location.

But it was not until the end of my first year of university that the idea became something I wanted to seriously pursue. While studying for the LEED Green Associate exam, and later continuing into LEED AP preparation, I became increasingly interested in the actual process of delivering projects rather than only evaluating outcomes.

The concept of integrative process had become particularly intriguing to me. This refers to the idea that better projects emerge when information is brought into the conversation earlier, while decisions are still flexible and disciplines still have room to influence one another.

I became fascinated by the fact that many of the decisions with the greatest long term consequences are made during moments that are often fast moving, assumption heavy, and operating with incomplete information.

That concept solidified many of the questions I had already been thinking about for years.

Why are teams still discovering constraints after design begins? Why are decisions that shape cost, performance, risk, and sustainability often made when information is weakest? Why do we continue adding software while project teams still struggle to see the full picture?

That period pushed my research beyond environmental systems and into coordination, dispersed knowledge, and the structural causes of information fragmentation across AEC.

Siloplot ultimately grew from a simple observation:

Projects fail because decisions are made with incomplete visibility.

I am building Siloplot because I believe the people designing and delivering our built environment deserve better tools at the moment decisions actually matter.

I share this context early because construction technology is entering a period where new tools appear faster than ever.

Before adding more systems, I think it is worth asking whether those systems are helping teams understand projects more clearly, or simply increasing the volume of information teams are already expected to manage.