Hello Reader, The story we keep telling about AI in practice is that it makes the work faster. Draw it faster, document it faster, and get the deliverable out the door faster. That might be the least interesting thing it does. The more useful thing, and the one almost no firm is built to use, is that it makes us question something we stopped noticing a long time ago: why are we still working the way we always have? It's the question I kept circling in this week's bonus episode, a conversation...
11 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, My latest episode of Practice Disrupted is about AI closing the gap between a sketch and a built thing. I sat down with the team behind Trimble's 0-60 program and Formas.AI, and we discussed how quickly those tools are moving. /// Listen Here: Closing the gap between sketch and build, with Trimble 0-60 and Formas.AI. But the tools were never the part that kept me up. The harder question is what happens to the practice around them. Practice of Architecture is a business in...
18 days ago • 3 min read
2026 Hello Reader, There are small moments with my kids I would give a lot to keep, the offhand thing said on an ordinary Tuesday that you only realize later you wanted to hold onto. Most of us try to save those by typing out what we remember, which means we mostly save what was already top of mind. A real conversation does more: it asks the next question and pulls out what you didn't know you knew. I saw a version of this last year, a demo at a Conference of Mayors meeting where AI gathered...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, The World Cup kicked off this week, and I caught it in the best possible way, on foot, walking through downtown San Diego and the Gaslamp Quarter. Nearly every bar had the match on. People stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to watch a monitor through a window, and you could follow the US team's goals just by listening, a cheer rolling up the street for the first, the second, and the third. There is a particular warmth in hearing a whole neighborhood pull for the same...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, There are weeks I miss being part of an architecture firm. I miss the people more than the work: the hallway conversations, the shared stakes, the sense of rooting for the same outcome. That pull is part of why I stay so engaged with the AIA, and why I count myself lucky to serve as an outside board member at Shepley Bulfinch. Last week we met in Boston and spent our time on what the future of practice looks like. Those are the conversations that get me most excited, and I...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
2026 Hello Reader, Tomorrow is the first day of Pride Month, and on Monday, Out in Architecture Volume II goes out into the world. This week's Practice Disrupted episode is the first of two conversations marking that release, and it is one of the few I have not hosted myself. I stepped back, Sarah Woynicz held the room, and four architects who shaped both volumes did the work of saying out loud what is getting harder to say each year. I listened to this one twice. The first time as someone...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, It's graduation season, and there's a question we keep asking architecture students. What firm are you going to? It gets asked at receptions, at dinner tables, and in final crits, and it isn't the wrong question. It's just no longer broad enough. The broader question, what they are going to build with what architecture trained them to see, is one almost no one teaches them to answer. But they are finding their own way, in spite of it all. This week's guest is one of the...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, I sat with a consultant this week whose work crosses our industry and a handful of adjacent ones. She said something I have been trying to push back on and cannot. Architecture firms turn down outside expertise on the firm itself in a way other industries don't. Not the projects, not the buildings, the practice. We are the profession that brings in specialists for everything. A window detail, an envelope study, a code review, a community engagement plan. And then we treat...
2 months ago • 2 min read
2026 Hello Reader, My kids were debating whether I build things. Not whether I’m an architect, they already know that part. Whether I actually build. I asked them what they thought building meant. Buildings, they said. Houses. Things you can walk into. I tried to push them, what about systems, what about the way a process gets put together. My eight-year-old looked at me and said, “I don’t get it.” I sat with that. Because honestly, the profession hasn’t done a great job of naming the answer...
2 months ago • 1 min read