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S2E09

How AI Is Rewriting Architecture, Climate Resilience & Urban Design | Angelos Chronis | S2E9

with Angelos Chronis· InFraReD City, Austrian Institute of Technology· 61m

TL;DR

Up to 80% of buildings are constructed without prior climate assessment, while massing decisions made in just a few weeks lock in 50 years of energy consumption and microclimate vulnerability. AI-driven surrogate models can compress complex CFD wind and microclimate simulations from 24 hours to sub-second runtimes, enabling real-time performance evaluation during early-stage architectural design. Embedding actionable climate data into property valuation and urban planning workflows creates financial accountability for green design features and urban resilience.

Synopsis
In this episode, Angelos Chronis, CEO and co-founder of InFraReD City and former head of the City Intelligence Lab at the Austrian Institute of Technology, explores the intersection of computational architecture, AI surrogate modeling, and urban resilience. Chronis discusses how high-performance simulation traditionally locked out rapid iteration in early building massing, leading to decades of locked-in energy inefficiencies and urban heat risks. He explains how InFraReD City uses neural networks and agentic AI workflows to compress day-long CFD calculations into sub-second feedback loops. The conversation covers the practical hurdles of climate modeling liabilities, Central and Eastern Europe's built environment challenges, and the potential of shifting real estate market incentives through hyper-local microclimate risk data.

Key metrics

by the numbers · 5
  • 90%
    Share of global cities facing severe climate risks according to the UN
  • 45 or 50%
    Share of cities globally that have an active climate adaptation plan
  • less than a second
    Time to run AI wind simulation versus a full day for traditional CFD
  • 80%
    Share of all buildings built without any climate assessment
  • 40%
    Share of global emissions originating from the built environment

Topics

7 tags
computational architectureurban microclimateai modelingbuilding energy efficiencyurban planningclimate resiliencereal estate valuation
Stats
Duration
1h 00m
Words
11.0k
Questions
57
Speakers
3

Daniel Schaub · Angelos Chronis · Rahul Mishra

Timeline

9 chapters

  1. From Patras to Foster + Partners and AIT

    Angelos Chronis charts his career path through computational design, UCL, Foster + Partners, and founding the City Intelligence Lab at AIT.

  2. Bridging Design with Performance-Driven Simulation

    Chronis describes the latency bottleneck of traditional CFD wind simulations and the development of AI surrogate models to compress runtimes to sub-second speeds.

  3. Defining Climate-Resilient Smart Cities

    The discussion pivots from conventional IoT definitions of smart cities toward urban assets that withstand severe heat waves and wind events.

  4. The InFraReD Platform and Agentic Workflows

    Chronis details InFraReD's suite of over 20 predictive models, training pipelines, and multi-agent systems that generate automated climate performance reports.

  5. Accuracy, Liability, and Usability Debates

    The trade-offs between scientific accuracy, liability thresholds, and practical design speed are contrasted against the baseline of 80% of buildings having zero climate vetting.

  6. Real Estate Valuation and Climate Risk

    Chronis outlines how integrating balcony wind viability, thermal stress metrics, and green roofs into property pricing could reshape real estate development incentives.

  7. AI in Architectural Education and Programming

    Chronis explains why teaching conventional code to architecture students is becoming obsolete as agentic prototyping and natural language interfaces advance.

  8. CEE Ecosystem and Built Environment Potential

    An analysis of innovation ecosystems across Central and Eastern Europe, comparing startup velocity, Soviet-era urban planning forms, and the need for greenification.

  9. Quick Fire Round and Future Vision

    Chronis covers personal apartment selection criteria, hypothetical €1B investment in a global city simulator, and the imperative for architects to accept climate responsibility.

Key insights

4 takeaways
  • 01

    Massing decisions made in weeks lock in 50 years of building performance

    While whole-project lifecycles span years, key architectural decisions regarding building mass, window placement, and orientation are decided within a 1-to-2-month window. Because traditional microclimate and wind simulations require days per iteration, architects frequently make these critical decisions with little to no environmental data, locking in half a century of operational emissions and tenant thermal stress.

  • 02

    Sub-second AI models make early-stage climate simulation actionable

    By training machine learning models on more than 500,000 baseline physical simulations, InFraReD reduces CFD wind and radiation calculation times from 24 hours to under one second. This near-instant feedback loop allows designers to interactively adjust geometry within CAD and BIM environments, closing the gap between academic simulation and real-world design timelines.

  • 03

    Real estate value chains shift only when climate performance affects asset pricing

    Current property search and valuation engines prioritize raw square meters and basic energy labels while ignoring operational vulnerabilities such as extreme heat days or wind-whipped outdoor spaces. Transparently quantifying microclimate risks—such as the number of days a balcony will be unusable or a top floor will face cooling system failure—can incentivize developers to invest in green roofs and passive cooling.

  • 04

    Soviet-era urban master planning offers spatial advantages for climate resilience

    Central and Eastern European cities shaped by Soviet-era planning possess high-value urban planning elements, particularly generous open spaces between blocks and distinct massing. The primary vulnerability across the region is an absence of greenification, shading, and water retention features that must be integrated to mitigate escalating urban heat island effects.

Pull quotes

6 quotes
  • So we developed an AI model back in 2009 together with my co-founders, sort of compressed that sort of simulation time into like less than a second, right? So essentially you could just move a building around and immediately see the result.
    Angelos Chronis
  • This is a debate I always have with climate scientists, like if your if for you to make a sort of like an assessment of a design you have to take a month for each design option that I give you, you're not useful to me, because I have to make that decision in a week.
    Angelos Chronis
  • That's another stat: 80% of all buildings are built without any climate assessment, zero whatsoever. So from that to to a very accurate model, there's a huge difference.
    Angelos Chronis
  • How do we allow like, you know, a couple of months or even weeks of decision making with very little or zero data affects 50 years of design decisions? You know, it's it's It's a really you know, 50 years of operation because of our design decisions. It's really astonishing if you think about it.
    Angelos Chronis
  • I actually think that people who learn programming today will be obsolete in in three, four years, right? Like there will be no need for programming, and I'm not saying that. Anthropic is saying that, you know, Microsoft is saying that.
    Angelos Chronis
  • If 40% of emissions comes because of our mistakes of the urban environment, then we should not be thinking that we are the creative cool people. We are actually worse than the oil industry in how we're affecting the the urban environment.
    Angelos Chronis
Transcript168 cuesClick a timestamp to jump
  1. Daniel Schaub: Welcome to a new episode here in the Energy Bridge. Today we have the pleasure to have Angelos Chronis, from Greece this time, but with a lot of experience in London, Barcelona, now based in Vienna, and today we're going to explore architecture, AI, and smart cities. So welcome, Angelos. Very nice to have you here.
  2. Angelos Chronis: Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure and honor, and really looking forward to a discussion.
  3. Daniel Schaub: Yeah.
  4. Rahul Mishra: Thank you Angelos, and I have a very warm feeling, maybe that you are from Greece.
  5. Angelos Chronis: That's That's helping always.
  6. Daniel Schaub: Yeah. So well, to start maybe to know a bit about your journey. Just started architecture, but now you are exploring with AI and smart cities, so how was this journey now into the energy sector?
  7. Angelos Chronis: Yeah, so I I'm from Greece as we established. I've studied architecture because I wasn't really great a great student. It took me about 10 years to finish the architecture school in in the University of Patras in Greece. I have to admit I didn't really like architecture that much in its original form. And then very quickly I discovered, with the help of probably the most important mentor I had, Professor Katherine Liapi, the world of computational architecture, like the sort of like merged between computer science and architecture, and and research-driven design. And that's what led me to, after I finished my studies in in Greece, to move to London. I studied at UCL at the Adaptive Architecture and Computation course back then of the Bartlett School of Architecture, where I learned programming, about 2009. That's like already maybe 16 years ago. And well, I discovered my passion for programming, which was more than my passion for let's say, CAD or other type of design. And eventually, probably became good at that. And then brought myself to Foster and Partners. The The firm back then had a group which was called the Spatial Modelling Group. It was the most well known research group that that that there was on computational design, and I joined that group. Eventually, then, after that, we spun off another group which was called Applied Research and Development. Now it's still one of the main research groups at Foster and Partners. I was one of the founding members of this group. We were four people. And I also started teaching at UCL. And teaching for me has always been and still is a huge inspiration source, because, you know, very, very early you you realize that you're stagnating in ideas, and the moment you start meeting younger people, and, you know,
  8. Daniel Schaub: They keep you hungry.
  9. Angelos Chronis: Absolutely. And then, after a while in London, I got sick of London, probably.
  10. Daniel Schaub: Okay.
  11. Angelos Chronis: Maybe also the office and some other things. And then I decided to move to move on. I went to Barcelona. I did a Marie Curie PhD program, which, by the way, I never submitted, so I don't have the PhD. And I worked with the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, a private school in Barcelona, which is also very well known for its research. And that kind of like led me to a whole new world of opportunities. Um, while before I was more sort of like on the digital side of things, like simulations and integration of simulation software, I also helped develop a lab in at Foster and Partners, eventually I moved also to materials, to also other scales. We worked with 3D printing of clay or other sort of like, you know, very interesting material and physical properties, but still always with a focus on on environmental performance of buildings, materials, and designs, and also urban urban side. And eventually, after 3 years in Barcelona and also teaching around the world a little bit, I brought myself to Vienna, where there was a position at the Austrian Institute of Technology to lead what was back then being developed, which is the City Intelligence Lab, which I developed further and grown and, eventually, became one of the flagship labs of the Austrian Institute of Technology, and it's where InFraReD City was born, initially as a research project. By the way, very few people know that InFraReD is actually an abbreviation that we came up with my one of my co-founders, Theodoros Galanos, and it literally means Intelligent Framework for Resilient Design. So that's where the InFraReD part comes from. But then it got stuck, and then we had to find a a sort of like domain that works, infrared.city worked, so that's how the company was called, on the InFraReD City. And and then, of course, we this was a successful project, and how that's how it led to the development of the company, the InFraReD City company, which is a spin-off from the Austrian Institute of Technology. I'm that's what I'm doing right now, so my my main my main sort of like occupation every day is InFraReD City. But I'm also still associated and working with the Austrian Institute of Technology, helping them continue to develop the lab. And I'm also directing, co-directing a re- an academic program in Barcelona, in IAAC, where I'm still teaching, which is called Master in AI for Architecture and Business Innovation.
  12. Daniel Schaub: Wow, so many topics to address today.
  13. Angelos Chronis: Yeah, that's a that's kind of like the short story. There's a few things other there here and there. But, like, you know, at at 45, I think it's it's still short enough.
  14. Daniel Schaub: Super. Starting with the end, with the spin-off, InFraReD. What was your main pain that you had inside AIT that motivated you to to found InFraReD?
  15. Angelos Chronis: Yeah, so actually that's a a pain point that has kind of driven my whole career path and also my whole research work. So even back at the University of Patras, when I was doing my thesis, research thesis, I was For me, the problem was always this, right? Like, we brought ourselves into a moment where architecture can practically design and build any form. Back then, the big sort of like, you know, innovation was you know, there's sort of like I the freeform architecture. I can design any form and make it into a building. There's sort of like sculptural idea. I always, always opposing to this idea and saying if you're going to use the best technology that comes from aerospace engineering and naval sort of like design, you have to use it for a purpose. You have to have like, you know, you have to increase the performance of that building, or of that configuration, of that like urban environment. So I was always trying to find a way to bridge design with performance, and that's what we never normally call performance-driven design, right? And my focus has always been on bringing the simulation to design. So from the very early days back then, I tried to bring wind as a simulation to the form of a building. At UCL, during my thesis, I actually developed my own CFD solver. Like, so actually developed a wind simulation tool doing my thesis. And at Fosters, I was also like developing several design systems that were actually bringing simulation to design.
  16. Daniel Schaub: So, is how the wind impact in the performance of the building, in in terms of temperature, ventilation?
  17. Angelos Chronis: There is a lot of different aspects. Like, wind is one of them. My focus has always been mostly on wind, but it doesn't It's not just wind. It's solar radiation, it's thermal comfort, it's other things. It's like, you know, everything that constitutes an interaction of the built environment and the climate is what defines the performance. It could be heat gains and solar gains, it could be pedestrian comfort, for example, from wind or other things. So eventually, that was my work always. And if we even look at the work that I was doing at IAAC at the at the Barcelona school, it was still like how materials interact with climate and how do we bring simulation in the design of innovative materials, etc. At the City Intelligence Lab, what we were doing when I first came there was trying to find a way to bring together all the different aspects of design, the urban scale at this at this point, which included climate, mobility, and other sort of topics, and to bring the simulation like as, you know, early as possible in the decision making, right? So when I have a bunch of buildings and I'm like designing a configuration of this place where we are now, right? Every design decision has an effect on the wind, on the pedestrian, on
  18. Daniel Schaub: Orientation, window.
  19. Angelos Chronis: Exactly. Having the ability to very quickly test is crucial in making more, you know, informed decision and increasing the performance. So we were trying to find ways to bring simulation faster into design, specifically for wind. That's very difficult. Just one simulation can take like, you know, a whole day. And you know, you have to set it up, mesh, etc, etc. So we developed an AI model back in 2009 together with my co-founders, sort of compressed that sort of simulation time into like less than a second, right? So essentially you could just move a building around and immediately see the result. And that was the breakthrough, so And that was like early days AI, like before it was in the news kind of thing.
  20. Daniel Schaub: Before being called AI, like, more machine learning or
  21. Angelos Chronis: Well, no. I mean, it was still called AI, but for some of us, like I've I've, you know I was teaching machine learning or neural networks to architects 15 years ago, so it's not like that new for me and also for my for my, you know, colleagues and my co-founders. But it was kind of like the the capabilities in 2009 sorry, 2019, which is when when we the model, were immensely bigger. So when we developed that first model, we realized that we have something in our hands that's like really, really useful, and people wanted to use it, we wanted to play with it, we had some sort of like architectural offices and like other clients buying licenses for it. So that's what created the idea and also the the incentive to to build a software company out of it, like.
  22. Rahul Mishra: And Angelos, uh, I I'll just take you one step, uh, behind.
  23. Angelos Chronis: Yeah.
  24. Rahul Mishra: It's You lived in many different cities, right? Like you're from Athens? You're
  25. Angelos Chronis: I'm from Kalamata, where the olives come from.
  26. Rahul Mishra: Okay. But you lived in different big cities, so what makes a city a smart city?
  27. Angelos Chronis: Oh.
  28. Rahul Mishra: What and what is a smart city?
  29. Angelos Chronis: I I don't think I'm capable of, like, fully answering the question because like, I'm not really a smart city ex- expert, but, I mean, from the resilience point of view, from the, you know, from the climate point of view, I think a city that knows how its assets, its urban assets, how its, you know, building stock, and its urban furniture, and its parks, and its vegetation are currently performing and how they will affect its resilience is a smart city. I know people care a lot about sort of like, you know, IoT and, you know, the economy around it. What good is any Internet of Things or any general sort of like connectivity if you if you have a city that is hit by massive heat waves and huge wind events, etc? I think that we don't Very often, we don't realize what is coming, and what is coming is not so, you know, let's say, bright. I don't I, you know, I'm normally a nihilist. I like talking about the future in a in bleak terms, but it's also reality, right? Like, so it there is an a significant threat for for most of cities. I usually use this these numbers in a pitch. 90% of of all the cities in the world will face severe climate risks.
  30. Daniel Schaub: In which year? Like 2050, '70? Like this 90%?
  31. Angelos Chronis: I I I don't know when. This is just sort of like, you know, how many cities are endangered. Like, I mean, I guess every city can be endangered more or less, but like that's a number that comes from um from UN. But And then there's like, you know, how many cities are planning for it, right? And it's like only 45 or 50% of them are have some sort of adaptation plan. So a smart city for me is a city that understands the challenges that are coming, and has some sort of plan for for them.
  32. Rahul Mishra: Okay.
  33. Angelos Chronis: And digital sort of like
  34. Daniel Schaub: Is one part of it.
  35. Angelos Chronis: but not the whole. So But, like, a digital twin and like a digital sort of representation of the city is a very important base layer upon which you can do scenarios, you can try different approaches and adaptation measures, and play them out as simulations, etc. That's why I think simulation is super important in that.
  36. Rahul Mishra: And now, if you could walk us through the journey of InFraReD and also the software solution that you have now?
  37. Angelos Chronis: Yes, absolutely. So we started with, I was saying before, this sort of like wind models, right? Like, what happens if you move a building from here to there? Like, how much wind would flow around it? Especially where we are here, that actually that that is a very important topic. I think you're you're experiencing it yourself. So we started from there, but then we brought in a lot of other models. And now we have more than 20 different sort of like analytics and simulations sort of like models. We had to train models, so like keep in mind that, you know, when you're saying I'm going to replace simulation for wind, for example, or for like thermal comfort or solar, etc, you have to run a bunch of other a bunch of like potential simulations and train a model to predict the results. And sometimes we do that with purely predictive models, sometimes we do them with statistical models, sometimes there's a combination of GPU computing and others. So there's a very different things. But we've built now a suite of like more than 20 models and like more than half a million simulations that we've run to train these models. So we started at AIT as a as I say, a research project. We did the first sort of like wind and solar models. Then once we spun off, we developed a full software suite around it. Right now what we have is we have a web app where people can just directly go sign up and use the simulations. We have plug-ins for major CAD, BIM, GIS, essentially engines. And we've also opened up API access to a lot of our users, and they're they're actually building on top of that interesting applications. And today what we're seeing, which is very interesting part is, because we have this sort of like core AI models and then we have this agentic AI framework that allows us to generate reports and KPIs very quickly, we can now build very quickly products. We've built five prototypes since end of November or something, since mid-November. Five new completely new prototypes with the models, and that's what we are seeing right now. We're seeing this huge acceleration of AI development and how we can really quickly leverage what we've built in terms of the back end.
  38. Daniel Schaub: And since since you have been like a from the beginning of AI developing, are you exploring now also with agents, for example?
  39. Angelos Chronis: Of course. From very early, like, days. This is not just now. We, you know, both my co-founder, Theodoros Galanos, and we have a new CTO now. All of them all of them are like essentially very, very pro AI agentic development. So, absolutely, yes.
  40. Daniel Schaub: So which application are you envisioning?
  41. Angelos Chronis: Oh, so our agents do multiple things, right? So, first of all, there's like a reporting site, so like there's one thing is like, you know, having a simulation done, having a sort of like result, and then explaining that result, making it a sort of like actionable insight or like, you know, a
  42. Daniel Schaub: Infographic, video, summary.
  43. Angelos Chronis: Any Any of those. Mostly like, you know, a reporting mechanism. Like, you know, what does that what does that simulation result mean for you? So if you're like, you know, seeing a 20% of your area having super high wind for and, you know, dangerous conditions for pedestrian comfort, what does that mean? What can you do? So there's the There's the analytics of the agent, and then there's also the recommendations, so it gives you recommendations on what to do in a certain environment. Then we now have sort of like the ability to run models. Like, so an agent can go in and figure out which simulations to run, and run the right simulations, and, you know, that's agentic sort of like modeling. So a multimodal sort of like agentic AI. And then, of course, there's like, you know, fetching the right data, helping the users sort of like set up a project, like set up a a design let's say, simulation process. We think that, as we're moving to the future, we will use more and more sort of like agentic workflows. It doesn't have to be necessarily agents, it can be like agentic workflows, meaning more general sense, but
  44. Daniel Schaub: What's the difference, sorry?
  45. Angelos Chronis: I mean, I'm not like really also an expert on that, but like I think that, you know, one thing is like creating a sort of entity which is an agent that like goes and does a certain task. The other is like, here's what I need. I need a report on the wind, etc, and the workflow can figure out if it has to run an agent, if it has to like, you know, call a certain like it doesn't have to be an agent per se, like, you know, with a persona, etc.
  46. Daniel Schaub: Okay, okay.
  47. Daniel Schaub: A following question, it's we are in a exceptical region, the DACH region, so
  48. Angelos Chronis: Yeah.
  49. Daniel Schaub: how do you deal with the resistant regarding the hallucinations of AI in the results?
  50. Angelos Chronis: There is ways to control that part, right? So like, you know, of course, AI hallucinates because it's a probabilistic model, but it depends on what you ask AI models to do, right? You can restrict AI models to only respond within a specific set of information or knowledge base, so like you don't have to always allow your AI models to hallucinate widely. So It's a bit of a balancing game of taming essentially your your AI freedom, right? Let's put it like that. The agents can can You can let them like run freely, but you can also restrict them with other agents that like, you know, check their information. So there is very a very interesting discussion on like, you know, accuracy of a result, let's say, usability of a result, so, you know, there's This is a debate I always have with climate scientists, like if your if for you to make a sort of like an assessment of a design you have to take a month for each design option that I give you, you're not useful to me, because I have to make that decision in a week. So I'm not really going to be able to wait for a month, right? And then that's like kind of like the debate that I always have like with with climate scientists. It's like, you know, There's a We also run a podcast, and, you know, one of my of our guests said this once in in our first first podcast, Giovanni Betti from Now he's he's at Berlin Technical University, I think. He said that every model is wrong, and this is not his quote, he said it he's quoting someone else, that like every model is wrong, but some are useful, right? So it really depends on what you do with it. So there's a question of like accuracy versus usability, but then there's a liability kind of like question. Like, if I am liable for, you know, the percentage of the area here that is going to be like livable, and you can, you know, sue me for that, then it's a different discussion. So that's where it gets interesting, like, you know, we we should always Like, you're not going to ask your AI, you know, favored model to generate a contract for your employee, right? Like you're not going to do that, because you you fear the liability if you've written something that's completely wrong there. But you can ask it to generate something, you can check it with a lawyer or whatever, and then you can give it to them.
  51. Daniel Schaub: A draft.
  52. Angelos Chronis: Exactly. So you can also do that with designs. You can probably generate a draft, and then go check them, if you have to check them, right? Like, the question is how many designs are today checked? You live in a house, most probably, and, you know, how often is this house checked for the climate? That's another stat: 80% of all buildings are built without any climate assessment, zero whatsoever. So from that to to a very accurate model, there's a huge difference.
  53. Rahul Mishra: Going forward, where speed, you said, since last November, you've been able to make six prototype, and in the industry where, especially the speed, I don't know how how much it matters, because we we hear about like really long timeline for a for making a building and it's quite acceptable. Where do you think the optimizing of building with and the speed will matter going forward?
  54. Angelos Chronis: You know, this is this is actually a very interesting point, because I don't know the exact number, so I can't quote anything, but if, for example, the lifecycle of, you know, figuring out, like, I'm going to build a building, up to the building is built and people are inside and living, can be years, right? Like, you know, you can find a piece of land and then say I'm going to build something, it can take 5 years to until you have like a proper building, especially if it's a larger project. What's the timeline of designing that building, though? It might be 6 months. It's a very, you know, a very smaller It can be like, you know, 6 months to a year or something, right? Which is the design phase. It can be even smaller than that. What part of that design phase is the decision of the general form of the, you know, like the the the sort of like massing, as we call it, the mass of the building? Perhaps it's like month a month or two, right? It can be like much, much smaller. So how much time do you really have for assessing the climate performance of that building? Very, very little. So, and that's the interesting thing, right? If I choose to put windows on this side or the other side, or if I choose to sort of like, you know, put this form here and this other form there, I'm going to affect 50 years of dwelling and, you know, operating in that building, its energy, its climate conditions, its future climate performance, which is very questionable. How do we allow like, you know, a couple of months or even weeks of decision making with very little or zero data affects 50 years of design decisions? You know, it's it's It's a really you know, 50 years of operation because of our design decisions. It's really astonishing if you think about it.
  55. Daniel Schaub: Regarding the environmental performance of the buildings, how do you see the impact of AI or and the work that you are doing, that from my point of view is like the evolution of DesignBuilder, kind of. How do you see the efficiency, qualification or something with this tools? How How do you see it?
  56. Angelos Chronis: This is a very, very interesting point that I could probably talk for, you know, three sessions of this podcast about, but that's for me the most important, most interesting question, right? When you're buying or you're renting a flat today, you're going to your favorite, you know, engine for searching a flat, you know, and you're looking for square meters, like, you know, I need about 80 square meters because I, you know, I a two-person house, or whatever, I need three rooms, it has to be close to the metro station. By the way, if it has a view, it's great, right? Energy efficiency, maybe you have like, you know, in some in some places you have like this letters, they essentially just say, you know, have you Do you have like new windows? Do you not have new windows? Do you have Oh, does it have a balcony? Yeah, great. Does Does the balcony, you know, have an orientation? Face the north or the south? Less people look at it. What if I could tell you how many days per year that balcony will be unusable because of high winds? How many days per year that balcony would be unusable because of the thermal stress? If you're renting a penthouse, right, like, you know, or buying even a penthouse, what if I told you that in like, let's say, 20 years there will be like 20 days per summer that the temperature will be so high that, you know, your energy bill will be off the roof, but also you might be seeing failing systems. What if we start like bringing these ideas in, like, you know? Then you would probably think of a penthouse with a green roof that might perform a little bit better, then that green roof becomes an element of of real estate that's useful. What if you could, for every plot or every, you know, house you build or every flat, have a full climate review and its risks and its performance? And that actually affected the price? Then the whole real estate engine, the whole sorry the whole real estate market completely shifts its value towards something that has more impact to you. And that's where I think that's why I think this discussion is like very important and hugely interesting. One of the things we're trying to do with InFraReD City is also that. You know, making it possible for every real estate professional from from land acquisition down to selling and buying property, design, policy, technology of the buildings, etc, to to affect this value chain by bringing the impact that it has into. If you're selling green roofs, you want this to happen, right? You want to have the ability to prove to everyone in the real estate market that this has a hugely you know, influential part. And I think that we're currently living a bit of a, you know, shift in the world, like where people care about the geopolitics than they care about the climate. I do believe that this will change, eventually, because one of the things that's certain is that the climate crisis will not stop because we just choose to look at a different topic. So therefore, I think that that's hugely important.
  57. Rahul Mishra: Talking about climate change, the design perspective in Europe was always about insulation and keeping keeping the heat, and now with the heat waves, there's also a cooling perspective of it.
  58. Angelos Chronis: Yeah.
  59. Rahul Mishra: So, do do you have some real-life examples where also with InFraReD that changing the facade or changing the plan by a couple of meters that they they can actually avail the the design perspective way better?
  60. Angelos Chronis: It's very interesting for like In many cases, it's very interesting to see People always expect only one thing to happen with climate change. Like for example, like, you know, you know, temperature increase. It's not always the case, right? We'll have more floods, we'll have more like extreme wind events, which for Vienna for example are very interesting, or for Europe. When you're looking at at at sort of like the performance of buildings, insulation is surely important. The design decisions, which is like, you know, the massing, the windows, the openings, etc, are the very first step. So the the insulation is like essentially I have this amount of walls, and this amount of like, you know, windows. That's what I can do with them. And then there's, of course, like, you know, LEED and ASHRAE and whatever, like there's like tons of like guidelines on how to do
  61. Daniel Schaub: Certifications.
  62. Angelos Chronis: and also how to design properly, right? Like, put a 40% glazing ratio, and But then you have Dubai, right? And then you've got like, you know, literally glass towers in a desert with I don't know, some sort of like coating, or whatever. The There is a huge discrepancy between performance and what people want. And that's where it gets most interesting. So I think, in terms of like affecting design decisions and make them more like making them more sort of like performative, it's about also understanding understanding perhaps the the effect that you have on your own health and well-being. One very interesting point is light, quality of light, right? How many times have you been in an office where you have to actually bring in artificial light because the natural light is not brought in properly? Yes, you can make LED lights, and you can make this more sort of like, you know, efficient, but you could also bring There's ways to bring natural light in in, you know, it can be like way more efficient than than having to bring
  63. Daniel Schaub: From the design.
  64. Angelos Chronis: Yes, because I've seen that many times in, you know, when you people like want to design like floor plans that are massive, and have like no way of the light coming in, and it's like what were you thinking? I mean, and that's In many cases, people don't know, and don't understand the the effects. So they say, okay, yeah, I have like a floor plan that's like, you know, 20 m long. What's wrong with it? Yeah, there's never going to be light after 8 m. That's so that's what's wrong with it.
  65. Daniel Schaub: Yeah. And you mentioned a bit before about policy, that you want to be part of it. How do you see the evolution in Europe about energy efficiency in building, architecture, design, certifications, etc?
  66. Angelos Chronis: This is also a very interesting point. Like, you see taxonomies already kind of like not even there, failing or whatever, because again, our shifts in the interests. I think that it's very difficult to only drive the transition with policy. That's like very, very difficult. But I think it is it's also playing a crucial role. And I think that policy, instead of it being let's say restrictive policy on you know, sort of like a blanket restrictive policy, it should be incentivizing more than than restricting. Having an energy efficient or like well-designed building should be incentivized even more rather than making sure that, you know, everybody builds with 40% glazing or whatever. Like, you know, it's yeah.
  67. Rahul Mishra: I just have one question, and I it was just coming in my thoughts that we we went to Hamburg
  68. Angelos Chronis: Yeah.
  69. Rahul Mishra: like one year ago, and we looked at a lot of energy-efficient building. I've been to Oslo, in the center of Oslo also you have a lot of energy-efficient building. We In Vienna, there's a new building which are called very energy-efficient, but they all look very similar.
  70. Angelos Chronis: Why is that? That is a very another very interesting point. So like, you know, ugly energy efficient buildings, like that was also something that I had heated debates with with my colleague architect colleagues, which care like so much about, you know, the sculptural, you know. I I find this architecture also a little bit like, you know, boring, you know, sort of like, you know, the the the sort of like fluid form crap, if I may say. There is There's like questions on what is beautiful and what's not beautiful. For me, a building that I look at, and it's like full of green, and like there's like literally things there's like green green like your plant here, right? That there's like green coming out of of it, is a beautiful building. For a lot of architects, it's not. The very fact that Midjourney was popular with architects with the the literal crap that it was creating as a as a sort of like, you know, apologies for the language, of of a sort of visual effect, I think, you know, is is something we have to change. So what we consider beautiful or not, you know, and what we consider boring or less boring, we should probably reconsider based on something that's actually, you know, efficient, and, you know, nature is beautiful at the end of the day. But there's also a lot of debate of like, you know, when you're doing a sort of like an energy-efficient building, sometimes you go with the easy solutions because there's it's not like the biggest trend, right? Like it's it's not that you're really trying it's not that you're using all the cutting-edge tools that you have to make the building more efficient. It's mostly to make it more beautiful, right? So like all the freeform things that we're talking about could be used to make the building more efficient. And I always I always had a dream of like an aerodynamic building that actually takes wind in, channels it through, you know, internal channels, and you know, cools through Bernoulli effect and stuff like that the the building. There There could be that futuristic beautiful solutions that we could think of. We haven't put so much effort on it, I think. And there is, of course, a lot of There's also cost, but there's also high-end design that focuses on that. I mean, I worked in a in an office that we did a lot of that. But there's also like, you know, there's a cost and the and the drive. If you go to someone that builds like massive developments in, you know, I was in Riyadh in November, right? Like I've seen I haven't seen so many developments in my in my career before, and I've seen literally, you know, unit houses arrayed around like circular streets for no particular reason, just, you know, with their orientation shifting around around around the streets, which makes zero sense. Like zero sense in terms of like, you know, their performance. If anything, they should have been staying with the same orientation around, but they're just like literally like rotating around. And I think that that's that's such a naive way of designing that if that's, you know, the the bulk of of of development, imagine how much, you know, room for improvement there is.
  71. Daniel Schaub: Now, since you are shaping um a program, a master's program in in Spain, in Catalunya,
  72. Angelos Chronis: Yeah.
  73. Daniel Schaub: how do you see the this generation of students using AI and maybe relying too much in the AI answers and not with the the creativity from like this part from the architect soul?
  74. Angelos Chronis: That's very interesting. So I'm going to try to connect the previous argument about like changing and shifting the value, and also the AI revolution. Like, we built this new program at IAAC, which is called Master in AI for Architecture and Business Innovation, and there's the business innovation part, which is very important there. So first, connected to the previous question, so like one thing is like, you know, training new architects to embrace and use and design with AI, and they could be designing new tools, but they could also be designing new buildings, right? It's both of these things AI can be used. And the biggest question is how can they understand the effect that these new innovations, new sort of like developments will bring to the value chain of architecture in general? That's why the business innovation is super important. If I make, let's say, wild example, if I make a floor plan generator that, for any location in the world, can take in the surroundings and its sort of like the climate conditions and can optimize any sort of like, you know, window and and orientation configuration, right? What does this do to the architecture profession? What does it do to me as an architect? How does it change the business models? How does it change, you know, the real estate world, etc? So you have to understand that in order to be able to develop things that, a, are impactful and positive positively influencing, you know, society, and, b, you understand what you're doing with them. You're just not giving them out for free to someone, and then to your, you know, whoever sort of like architect, star architect, and then you just, you know, get paid a a basic salary.
  75. Daniel Schaub: Pressing a button and then
  76. Angelos Chronis: Yes, exactly. And then you you're replacing yourself even by, you know, not even getting value for. So like there's a lot of like there's a big aspect of this. And then there is the reliance on AI. I have to admit, you know, teaching AI today is very, very difficult. I've been teaching generally, not only AI, but other topics to architects for about 16 years now, and I've taught in more than 20 universities. I have to say that the last 5 years when we, because we were like leading most of the AI seminars and studios in in IAAC together with my colleague, Sergio Padrón, and Stasja Fedorova, we've been doing a lot of like this this sort of like seminars and also like outside of IAAC. And it is impossible to have a curriculum or to have like a sort of like, you know, set of skills or things that you teach. Five, 6 years ago, we were trying to get people to learn a bit of Python, do some sort of like, you know, model usage through APIs, whatever, like writing code in Colab. Today, this is
  77. Daniel Schaub: It's a prompt.
  78. Angelos Chronis: prehistory. This is like, you know, people come with Like, last week they were running a workshop, Stasja and Sergio were running a workshop, they made an IFC checker compliance checker with the students in a week, like a fully working prototype that tests IFCs for compliance in five different topics in a week, right? And that with students that never had any AI experience before, they had never touched code, or have, you know, they had probably prompted Midjourney and Nano Banana. The The progress is insane, and you can't really stop it. That's what like a lot of people are trying to We also had this discussion lots of times like, oh, we have to learn the basics, and you have to understand the models. I actually think that people who learn programming today will be obsolete in in three, four years, right? Like there will be no need for programming, and I'm not saying that. Anthropic is saying that, you know, Microsoft is saying that.
  79. Daniel Schaub: Devin. Now, now Devin Clawe, you know? The Devin Clawe.
  80. Angelos Chronis: Devin Clawe. That's I I actually posted this like 2 days ago. I said, like, this is where the Like, people don't even understand what's happening, and that helps me sleep better at night, because, you know,
  81. Daniel Schaub: Yeah, he doesn't know the code that the
  82. Angelos Chronis: The the the there is this This is the first $1 billion evaluated one-man company that was developed within a couple of, you know, within a few months.
  83. Daniel Schaub: And he doesn't know the code.
  84. Angelos Chronis: I know. I know. There's another very interesting story about someone that went to Davos with a smart contract device, and and had to had They had to bring a developer to the police to explain what what the code was, because he couldn't explain what the what the device was doing, and he was in Davos, and they were like accusing him. He's like lost $40,000.
  85. Rahul Mishra: But one thing that is still challenging is entrepreneurship,
  86. Angelos Chronis: Yes.
  87. Rahul Mishra: especially in in this part of the world. And and spinning off, you you were working at AIT, and how conducive was the environment for for entrepreneurship and spinning off at AIT? And and also if you just tell us, how had been your keeping the research purity and also the hustle of being an entrepreneur?
  88. Angelos Chronis: I have to admit that when I started working at AIT, being a founder of a company was not even remotely my my idea. That kind of like came naturally, and spinning off from AIT is not an easy thing to do, like, you know. A, Austria is not, you know, the number one entrepreneurial mindset in the world. Europe is not sort of like the easiest entrepreneurial And like not to mention AIT, right? I have a big shout-out to three people that made this happen. One is, of course, Nikolas Neubert, who was back then the the head of the unit that I was working in and saw the potential and told me from the beginning, I think this could be a spin-off, and this is a very interesting opportunity. Hans-Peter Blahowsky, who was the AIT start-up catalyst, he actually helped me a lot creating a business model out of this, because I was like, you know, I had a research project in my hands. And of course, Alexander Svejkovsky, which was back then the and and Anton Plimon, the CEO and the CFO of the company, that really made this happen, helped me a lot. Alex and and Anton really both really fundamentally instrumental in making this happen. So what I'm trying to say is if there's no people in an organization that see, you know, interesting opportunities and try to to make it happen, this is not going to happen. And I think Europe's biggest threat is that it doesn't have enough push for innovation and entrepreneurship. We really need you know, we need a Europe Delaware, where we can start a company in half a day, and a a sort of like pan-European university network that allows you to very quickly find another founder, form a company, start, you know, a spin-off, and then create value. We We can't be debating, you know, IP over different completely different frameworks in different countries. This is very, very difficult as an environment, and that is probably one of the reasons why we don't have, you know, the unicorns in Europe that we should have. And I think that there is movement towards that. You know, but if I could if I could be in a position where I could influence that, the number one thing I would do is like make a safe space for young people to explore value creation, and especially within European values, right? Like I love living in Europe. I would not move out of Europe, because I love the values that we share, like, you know, human rights,
  89. Daniel Schaub: Data protection.
  90. Angelos Chronis: data protection, privacy, but also environmental climate adaptation, like caring about the world. And it's it's good that we are leading this example, because we are also the ones that have like screwed up the whole world for a while, so
  91. Daniel Schaub: Yeah, so it's uh maybe one example in Europe, it's uh Estonia,
  92. Angelos Chronis: Yes.
  93. Daniel Schaub: which are making a super start-up ecosystem. So going into Central and Eastern Europe region,
  94. Angelos Chronis: Mhm.
  95. Daniel Schaub: how do you see that your solution can help them to leapfrog all what happened in Western Europe, but to be applied immediately there?
  96. Angelos Chronis: It is a very interesting topic. I come from Greece, so Greece can somehow like also be considered
  97. Rahul Mishra: Southern.
  98. Angelos Chronis: Central Eastern Europe.
  99. Daniel Schaub: But you are in summer all the year, so
  100. Angelos Chronis: Hey, it's kind of like South and Eastern Europe, but that doesn't really exist. We don't have an SE, it would just probably be just like Greece and and Italy.
  101. Daniel Schaub: Yeah.
  102. Angelos Chronis: The reason why I'm saying that, it's like because there's like huge difference. I was just looking at this Eurostat like map of, you know, GDP growth, or like, you know, GDP per capita growth, I don't remember exactly what it was, and I saw Poland for it. Poland Poland has really Crazy. skyrocketed in terms of like development, specifically on tech solutions, right? Estonia with the very clever scheme of of, you know, the digital citizenship, etc, like which is one part, but like it's also creating the general ecosystem. I think the Central Central Europe Eastern European with some bright exceptions of our neighbors, I'm not going to mention the specific countries that like not sure they want to be in Europe anymore, but like, you know, the there is there is like really a huge potential, and there's like less perhaps, um, how do you say, like rigidity in in governance that could allow this to happen. However, we see very different examples. Like, Greece is not doing as great in this in this sense. And what I've been I've been discussing with, you know, VCs in Greece, and like sort of like, you know, people who I'm actually there next week talking about some of these things, and the the the level of, you know, education in Greek universities is really great. It's like, you know, coming out of a Greek university, you like really know things. And having this talent pool, and then not being able to sort of like bring it together to create like a tech, you know, space, or something like that, is is really a missed opportunity. Corrupt governments don't make this very easy, but, you know, there is there is many things we could do, I think. Yeah, for Greece, I could also have like a whole new podcast. But the opportunity is is the most important one. So like the CEE's opportunity for growth is really immense. And I think that, again, incentivizing, you know, movement between countries, you know, collaborative sort of like ecosystems for entrepreneurship. I was three times in Poland in the past 2 years, twice in Prague, in Czech Republic, for innovation conferences, etc. So like, and also we've been with Mark, the Investment Readiness Program of Erste, we were with other Central Eastern Europeans. I was in Podim last year. I actually won the pitching competition, for which reason somehow they put my face everywhere. It's kind of like ridiculous. But yeah, apologies to anybody who saw my my face for no reason. But, yeah, like, I mean, that that space, for example, in Podim like showed me the the incredible founders that there are there, and their ideas ideas, and like really like start-ups that have like very advanced solutions. If they were in Silicon Valley, I think they would probably been, you know, thrown money at already. So then it's about creating a mini mini sort of Silicon Valley for the CEE.
  103. Daniel Schaub: So that's the potential in terms of entrepreneurship, but what about the potential in terms of architectural solutions to like the potential of the region, because with the Sovietics buildings and how the they could use this kind of technology to leapfrog the
  104. Angelos Chronis: It's actually you know, so like architecture and urban development in CEE is true truly like, you know, influenced by Soviet-era buildings, but at the same time, you know, when you're talking about urban planning, it it does have a lot of sort of like good ingredients. It has more open spaces, it has like, you know, it's not And I'm not talking about Greece. Greece is, you know, Athens is a really like it's one of the worst examples in in terms of like, you know, urban development, but, you know, if you look at, you know, Bulgaria, Romania, etc, like all the ex-East European ex-East bloc sort of countries, they do have some ingredients. Like, some of the Soviet-era urban planning wasn't that bad, to be honest. I'm not talking about the blocks, right? The potential is always for me related to, again, value creation. Like, you know, if we are saying that Warsaw is growing in a in its tech sort of like industry, and there's like need for more, you know, housing, etc, like that also brings an urban planning and urban sort of development incentive that that helps, you know, make things better. The one thing that we somehow like failed to do in all of Europe, and particularly in Central Eastern European and Southern Eastern European countries, is the greenification. And it's a pity, because like there is there are open spaces, they can be like a lot greener, but we don't make them greener for some reason, and then we're missing that part a lot. Again, my knowledge on on Central Eastern European architecture is not like great, but from what I know, there are there is potential, like the in terms of like the form, the massing of the of the of the cities, but there is a lot of need for measures for like, you know, resilience measures, like water water features, green features, shading, and, you know, protect protective elements that can be there, that can be implemented, but they need, again, incentivization, and they also need some sort of central planning and central sort of like policy.
  105. Rahul Mishra: Actually, I'm asking the question, uh, a little too late, but what what is the typical project that looks like at InFraReD?
  106. Angelos Chronis: There's different There's different types of projects. So for example, master plan projects, like, you know, projects that that require let's say, more than a few buildings, let's say, the waterfront redevelopment or other such projects. There is also more sort of like urban planning exercises, like, you know, landscaping. We had a really nice project, collaboration with LAND, the landscape company. And it also can be sort of like policy checks, like the we have a good also a project with the Connected Urban Twins of the Hamburg city, so then they're using simulations to check different sort of like policies, etc. So like it can be different scales, right? We also have projects that are not necessarily relevant to architecture. So we did a marathon simulator with GODO, a Japanese behavioral modeling company, and like we're looking at how people move, right? In this case, how marathon runners run, and how wind and the other sort of like climate effects affect their like, you know, routes. So that's another sort of like very tangent tangential sort of like aspect, but really equally important.
  107. Daniel Schaub: So we got to the last part of the interview, the quick fire round.
  108. Angelos Chronis: Absolutely.
  109. Daniel Schaub: And I wanted to start with one advice for one person that want to acquire a new apartment or house, what they could review to to take a good decision.
  110. Angelos Chronis: First of all, they can reach out to us if they want. But we don't do like, you know, very very small But yeah, there are many ways of checking today the the orientation, even if you just like ask your favorite AI assistant, you know, there's a house, this is the floor plan, this is its orientation, is this a good idea? And you can compare like two or three different ones. You will already get some sort of like let's say, assessment, initial assessment. You have to definitely check orientations, exposures to wind and solar aspects, and for sure, sort of like, you know, understand the general environment of your of your urban area. Like, when you're going somewhere, right, it's not just you there in your flat, it's also like what's being developed around you. So if you're like there and then there's like a massive development next to you that will block all your sun, then your solar access in the winter is going to be like funny.
  111. Daniel Schaub: Okay, so orientation here in the Northern Hemisphere should be southeast?
  112. Angelos Chronis: Well, you're not going to find like, you know, flats only on southeast, but like where the openings are. Yeah. Like, generally what we're trying to do is like, you know, have a good control of the southern like South. The sun is is hitting you on top from in, you know, up to a certain point from in the summer, which you want to avoid, and everything below a certain angle is, you know, the winter that you want to get in.
  113. Daniel Schaub: Yeah.
  114. Angelos Chronis: So, exactly. But south-oriented and east or south is the best,
  115. Daniel Schaub: Yeah.
  116. Angelos Chronis: because in the Southern Hemisphere, it's the opposite.
  117. Angelos Chronis: Yeah, true. But then how it gets complicated is like, yes, you can think about that, but then imagine if you're like exposed and you have like massive wind drafts, right? Then all the sound all the sound sort of like, you know, access gets hurt by the wind sort of like exposure. It's complicated, actually.
  118. Daniel Schaub: It is complicated.
  119. Rahul Mishra: That, uh, that's the orientation of the apartment and the the building spaces. How important is also mobility?
  120. Angelos Chronis: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I I lived the past 16 years without a car, so I I would say, you know, it's for me it's hugely important like how to be able to be mobile without a car. Accessibility and connectivity is generally something you can also very quickly assess. The simplest thing that you can do is go on sort of like, you know, any map intelligence AI thingy these days, and ask, you know, what is this location in terms of like, you know, its connectivity, its integration, variability, etc? One of my co-founders suggested always using Parallel AI, which is the sort of like specific does like really great deep research. Do a deep research on your on your sort of like location, and figure out, is this place good, well connected?
  121. Rahul Mishra: And do you add, uh, such things in your simulation as well, that, uh, how far is the EV charging, or what will happen with the heat pumps, or
  122. Angelos Chronis: We we don't have that right now in the platform, but this is one of the things that we will be adding as we go. This is what we were doing at the City Intelligence Lab, for sure, like AIT's studies always do that. But, yeah, absolutely. EV chargers is one thing, but also you know, general metrics like, you know, closest parks, access to amenities like, you know, a playground, a hospital. Like, you can probably get, you know, you can point a point in a map and get most of that information very, very fast today, yeah.
  123. Daniel Schaub: What do you think is the importance of bridging academy and research with industry, and include policymakers and innovation, startups?
  124. Angelos Chronis: Yeah, I think that all these people should sit in a table and like, you know, like really talk. But for me, like that drives also my work. So like I will always want to have a connection to academia so that I inform myself of new ideas, cutting-edge work and R&D to bring to the industrial sort of like aspect, the sort of like, you know, business aspect of things. And I think what sometimes policy is a little bit distant from all of that, so that's why I think that academia and and business should be part of the policy making.
  125. Rahul Mishra: Now, we can finally go to our quick fire round.
  126. Angelos Chronis: Yes, alright.
  127. Rahul Mishra: What do you say, uh, is the most overrated smart city technology: IoT, sensor, or trash can, or passive design
  128. Angelos Chronis: Oh, my. I don't
  129. Rahul Mishra: of making everything look similar?
  130. Angelos Chronis: I don't know if I can answer. I mean, like I think that electric scooters are like a little bit too much. Because, I don't know, I'm joking, everybody hates them a little bit, like, and then they love it, because when they use them. IoT devices, I don't know. I think that I think that there's a lot of like, you know, inventions or sort of like, you know, innovations that came that were were not really that impactful, and they were supposed to be like more sort of like a gimmick gimmicky sort of like ideas, but I can't think of anything right now, to be honest.
  131. Daniel Schaub: Okay. You worked in Foster + Partners,
  132. Angelos Chronis: Yeah.
  133. Daniel Schaub: that you say that it's a innovative firm,
  134. Angelos Chronis: Yeah.
  135. Daniel Schaub: but what do you think that is the most innovative spirit? In this kind of companies or in a three-people startup?
  136. Angelos Chronis: Well, big companies have big problems. So like, you know, when you're like a 1,500 employee company, you always have like this issue. I I have to say I've worked there, I'm really happy of the time I I, you know, I did there, and I've also worked further with with the brand in in general. But I just generally advise younger architects to not go for star architecture offices anymore. I don't think that this is their future. I think that they can today develop way more interesting and important sort of like solutions on their own. So I'm more for the three-person studios, start-up, whatever it is, doesn't matter.
  137. Daniel Schaub: Cool.
  138. Rahul Mishra: In in Vienna, we see it's, uh, everything is pretty much very nicely planned, but if you have one square to replan, what would that be?
  139. Angelos Chronis: If I had one square in like one block in in Vienna?
  140. Rahul Mishra: Yeah, one block in.
  141. Angelos Chronis: Well, I don't know if I would Like, Vienna is so beautiful. I love I love living here, like, and it's like a, you know, living in a museum. Every time someone comes here,
  142. Daniel Schaub: Nice.
  143. Angelos Chronis: Yeah, exactly, like, you know. Every time I have a visitor, I'm like let's look at what is there. So I'm not sure I would love to change something. The center would probably need more greenery. So I would like to not take a block, but take a street, and really make it a jungle, like pedestrianize it properly. Like, you know, the super block idea that There's a lot of like pedestrianization going on, and people would probably hate me for saying that, but I'm like a big advocate for pedestrianizing the the hell out of everything in a city. I think the greenification is what I'm somehow missing, and I think a lot of people are discussing. Hard surface re- renovation is or redevelopment is is a little bit boring.
  144. Daniel Schaub: If If you would have €1 billion,
  145. Angelos Chronis: Mhm.
  146. Daniel Schaub: how would you invest them to accelerate energy transition or to improve or foster more the technology that you are working on?
  147. Angelos Chronis: If I had €1 billion, first of all, I would probably reside in a Greek island for the rest of my life, but apart from that, which is a joke. If I had to invest it somewhere, I would invest it, and it will sound cheesy, and, you know, I'm in simulation, I'm a simulations guy, so I'm going to invest in simulation, but I would invest it in a global city simulator. I can't I'm I'm confident that we can make with 1 bi- €1 billion, we can make this, which just does one thing. For every city in the world, for every, you know, urban environment in the world, it can calculate the climate impact with the different scenarios, and it can generally allow you to play with solutions and scenarios in real time.
  148. Daniel Schaub: Nice. And that would be like a data center or?
  149. Angelos Chronis: No, that would be a an openly accessible sort of, you know, software platform that that or, you know, framework that you could use. Or, you know, if it has to be monetized, because we live in a monetized world, it would have to be, but yeah.
  150. Rahul Mishra: One piece of advice that you would have for the coming I think you you already gave a lot of advice for the coming architects, but but another profound piece of advice that you would have for them, especially in the AI era?
  151. Angelos Chronis: Yeah, I'm going to be probably provocative here, but I would say forget architecture as you knew it, because really, most architects get out of architecture schools with education of the previous century. Like, you know, you need to really escape the mentality of, you know, I have to draw everything by hand, and I have to sort of like, you know, follow the sort of like guidelines of like, you know, 50 years. You can liberate architecture quite a lot, and you know, it's one of the least innovated spaces in the world and one of the most impactful. I would also urge everybody to feel the responsibility. Most architects and designers and like on the sort of like, you know, creative potential, and I want to If you don't mind to touch upon this for a second more. They they think that they're like doing something that's, you know, less well paid, less sort of like, you know, impactful, but more sort of like creative. And I think this is a very wrong mentality. What what we're doing is hugely impactful, and it has a great impact on on our lives and our like, you know, well-being, and it cannot be reduced to something, oh, it's a creative industry sort of thing. It's hugely important, has like has huge responsibility. If 40% of emissions comes because of our mistakes of the urban environment, then we should not be thinking that we are the creative cool people. We are actually worse than the oil industry in how we're affecting the the urban environment. And for that reason, I want them to think the responsibility, but also the opportunity. So AI doesn't take any creativity out of people. The human brain is conditioned to be creative and innovative. No matter how much how much technology you throw at it, it will become more and more creative. So get that superpower that you have today, get your hands dirty with it, and remember of your responsibility.
  152. Daniel Schaub: Wow. Yeah, in that note, I I heard that for 2050 we're going to double the square meters built in the world, in the cities, so the impact of architecture, for sure, is huge, and also energy intensive and in the all the Opex, let's say, in the operations, so
  153. Angelos Chronis: We have a lot of work to do.
  154. Daniel Schaub: a lot of work. So thank you very much for for coming today. Very insightful interview.
  155. Angelos Chronis: It was a great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And really very interesting discussion. We could be going on for like a couple of hours.
  156. Daniel Schaub: Yeah, so we have pending the to talk about Greece, and the other episode was
  157. Angelos Chronis: Yes.
  158. Angelos Chronis: What was it? Oh, yeah. There's like
  159. Daniel Schaub: About policy and certifications and
  160. Angelos Chronis: Value chain.
  161. Daniel Schaub: Value chain.
  162. Rahul Mishra: Great. We can we can definitely touch upon that in the next episode, but we are going to have you in our June forum as well, so Exactly. We're looking forward.
  163. Angelos Chronis: Very much looking forward to that, yeah. And thank you for for doing this. This is a very, very nice initiative, and I think that, you know, you should continue like building this knowledge, because I think it's very important.
  164. Daniel Schaub: Thank you. We are on it.
  165. Rahul Mishra: Thank you. Thank you, Angelos.
  166. Daniel Schaub: And thank you to the community for watching the episode, and keep tuned for a next one here in the Energy Bridge. Ciao.
  167. Angelos Chronis: Bye.
  168. Daniel Schaub: Ciao, ciao, ciao.