About the studio

We decode the built environment.

Urban Decoders is an urban digital twin studio. We turn plans, city records and the feeds a city already publishes into living models that planning authorities, masterplanners, urban designers and development partners can plan, test and decide in. Founded by a chartered architect, run by an architect and a physicist, based in Stockport.

Our story

Founded by an architect, built for the industry.

Urban Decoders began with a simple frustration: the tools architects use stop at the drawing, while the decisions that matter play out in space. Founded by Michal Gryko — a RIBA and ARB chartered architect — the studio set out to close that gap with technology built by people who have actually practised architecture.

Today we combine digital twins, AI and Unreal Engine to turn masterplans and cities into living models that the people shaping them can decide in. That same research powers Arki Engine, our real-time design platform and an Epic MegaGrant recipient — and a YouTube channel where we teach the wider industry how to build it too.

Spatial studio team reviewing a 3D digital twin

Inside the studio

City data to real-time twin

The stack

From Grasshopper to game engine.

Parametric logic in Rhino and Grasshopper, BIM in Revit, GIS in QGIS, real-time in Unreal Engine 5 with Cesium and PLATEAU tiling, and a data layer of IFC, TopologicPy, graph databases and FastAPI bridges holding it together. The definitions behind our configurators are in the Lab.

Rhino · GrasshopperRevit · DynamoQGIS · GDALUnreal Engine 5Cesium 3D TilesPLATEAU · CityGMLIFC · TopologicPyNeo4jFastAPIComfyUI

The team

Architecture and engineering, in the same room.

Michal Gryko

Architect & CEO

A RIBA and ARB chartered architect with over ten years in practice, working across architecture and mixed-use masterplanning before founding Urban Decoders. Real schemes, real planning processes and real client rooms — that experience sets the design intent on every project the studio takes on.

Michal founded the studio to close the gap between the drawing and the decision. He leads how a district gets twinned, how a masterplan is tested against density, phasing and daylight, and how the result is put in front of authorities, partners and the public.

He is the architect behind Arki Engine, the studio's real-time design platform and an Epic MegaGrant recipient, and teaches digital twins and real-time visualisation to an audience of thousands.

Dr Piotr Gryko

Lead Software Engineer

A physicist by training — Physics MSci, PhD in nanotechnology — with over twelve years turning research into systems people depend on. Piotr leads engineering at Urban Decoders.

His AI work is what makes a twin more than geometry: computer vision turns aerial and street imagery into classified city data, and language models make planning and property documents searchable rather than merely filed — held to AI-safety practice, since the output reaches planning committees and the public.

Underneath sit the spatial databases, vector stores and real-time backend pipelines that hold a district at scale, and an IoT background feeding live sensor data back in. He also builds what people actually touch — the interactive apps and consultation platforms that let residents and stakeholders explore a scheme themselves.

What we believe

Principles that shape every project.

Architect-led

Built by people who have delivered real buildings — not just rendered them. Every tool starts from how design actually works.

Real-time by default

Digital twins and Unreal Engine mean the model stays live. What you explore is always current with the plan.

Open by nature

We teach what we build. Our tools, research and tutorials are shared openly with the whole AEC community.

The studio in numbers

Recognised, and shared openly.

Epic

MegaGrant awarded to Arki Engine, our real-time design platform

20K+

A YouTube community learning digital twins, AI & Unreal with us

50+

Tutorials published on real-time visualisation & spatial tech

RIBA·ARB

Chartered-architect–led studio, founded by Michal Gryko

Start your project

Meet the studio behind the skyline.

Tell us what you're planning. We'll show you how authorities, partners and the public can decide in it.

Start a twin See the work