Building Presence Together
From architecture to awareness, building structure for presence.
For years my work was about building systems: buildings, teams, and digital infrastructures. I believed, like many of us do, that if we just got the tools, workflows, and frameworks right and people on board, things would finally flow.
But they didn’t.
We automated, standardized, and optimized, yet still ended up overworked, reactive, and fragmented.
The problem wasn’t the lack of structure. It was that structure had lost contact with awareness.
We were building faster than we could stay present.
When Structure Stops Serving
During a stretch of burnout, personal drama and constant acceleration, I returned to a simple standing practice.
Fifteen to forty minutes a day, doing nothing but noticing the body.
No optimization. No progress bar. Just standing.
Slowly I started to see how attention, breath, and proportion could return, not through more control but through practice.
And that’s when the question flipped:
If we can design structures for information,
can we also design structures for awareness?
From Personal Practice to Shared Framework
That question became the seed of The Practice Circle,
a federation of small, self-organizing group that meets to train presence, dialogue, and shared responsibility.
No gurus. No belief system.
Just practice, documentation, and honest reflection repeated until it becomes culture.
Each circle is a living lab, testing what it means to organize human effort around awareness rather than authority.
It’s not a theory. It’s an experiment.
What We’re Exploring
How daily, embodied practice stabilizes attention and clarity
How small groups can share power without falling into chaos
How documentation can replace hierarchy as a source of accountability
How to evolve structures collectively through consent and reflection
It’s the same kind of thinking that shaped my work in architecture and project management, only now turned inward toward the architecture of attention.
# For the Geeks
Think of The Practice Circle as an **open-source project** for collective awareness. It’s an experiment to build the operating system for communal work — complete with documentation, version control, and distributed decision-making.
Just like in open-source software, everything here is transparent and forkable. Circles adapt, refine, and contribute back. Not only what we practice but also how we organize, decide, and evolve remains open to change.
[Github Repo](https://github.com/simondilhas/practice_circle/)
All toward one shared goal:
**increasing awareness through structure that stays alive.**Why Here, Why Now
I’m sharing this on Building Stories because this isn’t a departure. It’s a continuation.
I’ve always written about how we build, with code, models, and contracts.
Now it’s about how we build presence, because all our systems depend on it.
If you’ve followed the BIM stories, you already know the patterns:
We struggle with alignment, meaning, and communication.
The tools won’t fix that. But practice might.
So from time to time I will share my experiences and lessons learned here…
Join the Experiment
The first circles are forming now.
If you want to explore presence, shared power, and grounded structure, start here:
👉 Learn more about The Practice Circle
This is not another productivity method.
It’s a quiet rebellion against busyness, a return to building what sustains us.