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...
7 days 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...
14 days 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...
21 days 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...
28 days ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, May is AAPI Heritage Month. Every year when it arrives, I find myself sitting with the same question I have carried across most of my professional life: what does it actually mean to be heard in a room, not just present in it? Seeing and hearing are not the same thing. Presence is visible. Being heard is relational. And in most professional spaces, the quality of that relationship is built, or isn't built, through the conversations we choose to have and the ones we keep...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
2026 Hello Reader, I've been home more in the last few months than in most of the year before it. This week, I got back on the road, and somewhere between the airport and sharing the NASCC stage with some friends I've known for years. I found myself wondering what I could have been doing differently with all the time that I've been spending on the road. Part of the answer, I think, is the conversations. The kind that are harder to sidestep when you're standing next to the person they need to...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, My daughter is eight. She knows the day is coming when I won't be able to pick her up, so she has put me on a regimen. A few times a day, wherever I am, she finds me with her arms up. We have an agreement. She has a daily quota, and every time I get stronger, she raises it. She is not waiting for the moment when she is at risk. She is helping me build the capacity for it now. This week's guest, Amanda Schneider, has been doing the same kind of thinking for the profession....
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, This past week was a slow one, and I mean that in every sense. We lost Maxwell, our 15-year-old family dog, on the flight home from vacation. I came home sick. I'm still not fully back. Some weeks just are what they are. But I also came home to a question that wouldn't leave me. One that came from the conversation I recorded for this week's episode. How much of what architects say they value actually shows up in the way they practice? We talk about community. We use it in...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
2026 Hello Reader, This one is coming to you a day late. Spring break has a way of reminding you that rest isn't optional, and this week it did exactly that. We also came home to some hard news, the kind that slows everything down for a day or two. Life happens. You pick back up. Full transparency: I'm actively working toward automating this newsletter with the help of AI. The goal is to have it draw from my weekly notes and come together largely on its own, in my voice. I'm not there yet,...
2 months ago • 1 min read