A long time ago, when we were young and goofy – and brave, mostly – we made a viral video.
One of my dearest friends was interviewed.
Back then we were n-Gon, ten of us sitting in a 150 m2 basement, and the question was who would be foolish enough to come to work with us when we were throwing away all the tools – which designers in Hungary use – and starting from scratch on something completely new.


BuildEXT’s predecessor,
the n-Gon office (2017)
By now we have answered this.
Today, there are about 50 of us in a 650 m2 office with a panoramic view, and we employ at least 150 more external engineers in a workflow that is among the best in Europe.
Today it is no longer a question of who is the fool who wants to go down this road with us, because it turns out that this approach is spreading like wildfire abroad, and in Hungary the state is making it compulsory.
This is now the present.
But the world has changed and we now have different questions.
The question for us today is: what jobs will AI take over? How do we adapt to constant change and how do young colleagues learn new jobs, many of which we don’t even know the names of.
But this is not the biggest dilemma.
The biggest dilemma is where to find senior designers who are sufficiently experienced for their age, but fresh in spirit and adventurous enough to try out how digitalisation is reshaping the design and construction process.


Gergő was “professional”, but confidence is not everything. Since then, hundreds of people have tried their luck with us and I’ve got something from all of them.
Many of them really were professionals and helped us, or still help us, along the way. Some were strong in software, some in design, and of course a few have dropped out over the years. I feel sorry for many of them.
But I did learn something.
Set-up and knowledge are not everything. It is very important to have an openness and a low ego – which can laugh at slip-ups – and a humility about the diversity of our profession.
Because an architect is a psychologist, a designer, an engineer and a negotiator. Today, he is an innovator, BIM and AI expert. Just to name a few.
One cannot be good at everything.
What I strive for is for the team to be good. This is what I was striving for with Gergő and have been striving for ever since.
The task has grown, the boundaries have expanded and the service has become more complex, but what we have put together is based on a good foundation.
Gergő’s interview was strong.
For a long time, we didn’t dare use it, even though we looked at it many times. Now I’m launching it to take this idea with you and promise to publish the sequel if there is interest… Greg’s test day.
In the meantime, welcome and if you know of a designer or project manager who has seen a miracle, but still has the fire and is looking for a challenge… feel free to contact me. At the most, we’ll do an interview with him.