Han M.
Hoang

One question, asked from every angle.

How do we build housing that is more efficient, more affordable, and actually available to everyone on this planet? That is the only question I have been working on. Everything else is method.

When I finished grad school at MIT in 2005, my thesis advisor told me the technology to automate the design and construction process did not exist yet, and that it would take 25 to 30 years to arrive. I decided not to wait for it. For the past 20 years I have been chasing the same goal from different positions, each one a building block: a consultancy to master the digital model, a fabrication company to learn the factory, a robotics company to take it to the site, a vehicle company to understand how things actually move through a city.

That is the purpose behind starting so many companies. It is not restlessness, it is a search. Each venture is a probe into a different part of the same problem, and the real work is connecting the dots between them: the design model, the factory floor, the job site, the finished building someone can afford to live in. The industry keeps these pieces separate. I keep trying to fuse them into one cohesive process.

The technology my advisor predicted is finally arriving. My job now is to combine two decades of know-how, across BIM, fabrication, modular construction, automation, and the supply chain that carries all of it, into a building process that closes the gap between the digital plan and the physical home. That is the throughline. The companies below are where I am testing it.

Check out my biography

Han M. Hoang, born in 1975.

Han M. Hoang has spent more than 20 years trying to make one thing true: that the building you design and the building that actually gets built can be the same building. He is the founder and CEO of The BIM Factory, an industry-leading BIM engineering consultancy in Ho Chi Minh City, and the throughline of his career is the gap between the digital model and the physical structure, and how to close it.

He started far from Vietnam. At age 9, Han left the country for Los Angeles and grew up in the LA area. He studied architectural design at Woodbury University in Burbank starting in 1995 and earned a professional degree in architecture in 2000. But drawing buildings was never the point for him. How they got built was.

That question took him to MIT. He moved to Massachusetts in 2003 and graduated in 2005 with a Master's Degree in Architectural Studies, focused on advanced automated construction technology, work that earned him the Research Scholarship Award from the Design and Computation Group.

Before MIT, he had worked as a design associate at a Los Angeles architecture and urban planning firm, on large-scale commercial and entertainment projects across Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Arizona. After MIT, in 2005, he joined Bovis Lend Lease as an assistant project manager on major hospitality and residential projects in New York, and taught as a part-time adjunct professor at the New York Institute of Technology from 2005 to 2006. Design, then construction, then management: he was deliberately collecting the pieces of a process that the industry keeps apart.

In late 2008 he relocated to Vietnam and worked as a private project developer. What he saw there, a real need for better design and construction quality, became the reason to stop consulting on the problem and start building the answer. In 2014 he founded The BIM Factory, which had been operating since late 2013 and was officially registered that January, to create the region's most forward-thinking, highly skilled BIM engineering consultancy and master the digital model end of the problem.

From there the work moved closer to the physical build. In 2017 he founded The Fab Factory to attack fabrication and modular construction, which he rebranded and relaunched as The Fab Collective in 2025. In 2022 he began R&D on AROBOTIX, which he officially registered and launched in 2025, taking the digital plan all the way onto the job site through automation and robotics. Since 2017 he has served on the Ministry of Construction's BIM Steering Committee for Vietnam's BIM Roadmap, and he contributes to the DfMA Working Group at the BIMForum, helping define the next process for design and manufacturing in the building industry.

The mission has not changed since MIT, and the work is far from finished. Why it has taken so many companies to chase a single problem is the argument of the Mission page.

Read the longer version of my story

The long version.

I arrived in America at nine years old knowing two words of English: hello and bye. I did not know what hi meant.

My father had fled Vietnam as a refugee in 1977. It took seven years of paperwork to bring my sister and me to the United States, and when I landed I was meeting him for the first time. I lived with him until I was fifteen. Then Vietnam began opening to the world and he decided to go back. My sister was sixteen, I was fifteen, and from that point we raised ourselves.

I started my first job on my sixteenth birthday, cleaning the seating area at a McDonald's. I worked from then on because we had to survive. There was rarely money for rent, so we lived out of boxes and moved from place to place until we finished high school. No one guided me through any of it. Everything was a lesson I had to learn on my own, and I have treated life that way ever since.

Four schools, not two.

My first year nearly ended it. I was working as a file clerk at a medical office to support myself, and I did badly on the final. My professor told me I was not cut out for architecture and should find something else to do. So I quit the job, more or less lived at the school, borrowed a friend's father's truck, and gave it everything. Five years later I graduated from Woodbury University with its highest honors.

I worked for two years to learn how the real world builds, then applied to MIT. They accepted me because of my story. Once there I won a full scholarship that covered my study and my living, and I never earned anything below an A. I finished the degree in a single year, overlapping eight and nine classes a semester when one or two was the norm, which is how I became known on campus as the guy who finished in a year. I knew I was somewhere special, and I wanted to prove I belonged.

The year after, I joined the Media Lab and took whatever I wanted: electrical engineering, coding, mechanical work. I spent my time building robots and anything else I could imagine. I was in love with machines and how they worked, so I volunteered to assist on every advanced machine and piece of equipment I could find, learned them inside out, and ended up teaching other students how to run them.

Every job was there to teach me something.

I took most of my jobs to learn how things are actually built. At Orne and Associates I learned urban planning, but the bigger lesson was Richard Orne himself, the best boss I have ever had. The way he treated his people and ran his business became the model for every company I have started since. At Lend Lease, which I chose because it was the largest builder I could think of, I learned how enormous projects come together, including one major New York development I saw through from beginning to end. In Vietnam I learned how differently the world works depending on where you stand, and how to adapt to a culture instead of fighting it.

Family first, always.

My wife is the most important person in my life, and the smartest, most beautiful, and most talented person I know. She is the solid rock the rest of us stand on, the one who keeps us balanced and takes care of all of us, especially me. She makes the best food, tells the lamest jokes, and can always center me with a single joyful "Hiiiii" on the phone, no matter how I am feeling. It never fails to make me smile. She is the person I laugh with most and the one I can be completely myself around: patient, thoughtful, and endlessly supportive. I ask her advice on everything, because she is almost always right, and my favorite thing she says is, "Don't worry, I have a system for that..." Our four children come next, and they are the reason for all of it.

Essays on building, automation, and the gap between them.

Long-form pieces published on Medium. Each one links out to the full article.

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