Yesterday I felt well enough to get myself out of bed before the sunrise to head across to Basel for this year's Swissbau, a biennial construction conference for the Swiss market.
It was easier than in past years, as there's now a direct train from Neuchatel to Basel. (We used to have to change in Biel/Bienne). The journey was spectacular: as we skirted the Jura mountains, we went from dark and foggy to sunny and frosty (even snowy, in places).
Arriving at the main station in Basel I had a few minutes to catch the tram out to the Messeplatz.
There was a curious exhibit outside the exhibition centre, with "smoke" coming out of the ground.
It certainly had this group of schoolkids intrigued.
I headed in to the main area of Swissbau.
It's across three floors, although I admittedly only spent time on one of them, as it's more software and innovation focused.
There are a number of open areas where presentations were delivered, all in German (actually mostly Swiss German, from what I could tell).
There was an interesting workshop area where actual hands were getting dirty.
My main target was the stand of our platinum partner Mensch + Maschine (Man + Machine in English).
The stand's layout was quite familar from the last Swissbau, although showing newer technology, of course.
This is the first year they've been able to show Workshop XR.
There was a steady stream of people interested in trying it.
I had to go back to the stand multiple times to get to talk to my friend Marcel Ludwig. Marcel is one of the most passionate technologists I know, and is always in great demand at these events. Luckily he thrives on the discussions he has with customers.
Marcel also enjoys showing me things I didn't know our products could do, such as this ability for Autodesk Construction Cloud to map 2D floorplans onto 3D views. Super cool.
Here's a photo with Marcel and Andreas Gut, also from M+M. Yes, I did feel a little small standing between them.
I also had the chance to catch up with Bjørn Wittenberg, who used to work for Autodesk in our Education team and is not leading global event strategy for Chaos, the company who now owns Enscape and Veras.
Bjørn and his team very kindly hooked me up with some sweet Chaos swag… I'll for sure be wearing the socks at DevCon, Bjørn! 😀
The other person I really wanted to meet was camped out in the other side of the exhibit space, down on the ground floor. 
A number of academic institutions were present there, and so it was here that I found Alex Walzer, who is now at FHNW, a university in North-West Switzerland. I've known Alex for a few years, and he's shown up in blog posts about CAAD Futures 2023 and last year's AEC Hackathon in Zurich.
It was really good to reconnect with Alex and his colleagues. Back in the day I delivered a number of lectures at their campuses in Muttenz and Brugg. It would be good to reengage with them about our more recent work.
There's a lot of cool building-related technology on display at Swissbau, from taps and mattresses to heat pumps and solar panels. Every time I go I take a quick look to see whether this is the moment I get our hedges ripped out and replaced with vertical solar panels (spoiler: it never has been). Interesting to explore, in any case.
It turns out Swissbau has its own Sphere (who needs Las Vegas?). It's lower energy, in lots of ways. 😉
I'd arrived at Swissbau at 9:40am, and took the tram back at 1:15pm. I crammed a lot into this year's trip, so I definitely went back feeling it was worthwhile.
I arrived home in time for my day's meetings to start (I ended up on calls pretty solidly between 3:30pm and 7pm.
Once I was done I took Daisy for a walk in the local woods. It was very dark and very foggy - the only light was from her LED collar. I tried taking a few photos with the night mode on my Galaxy S24 - it's really impressive, as long as you have a steady hand.
My next post will focus on DevCon 2026, as we're inching towards that now.
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