2026

Hello Reader,

The architecture profession has been asking the wrong question about technology for a long time.

Not "which tools should we use?" but "what kind of practice are we trying to build?" And underneath that: do we even have the vocabulary for that conversation?

I've been thinking about this a lot this week, partly because of what's happening at the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Dean Jonathan Massey wrote about a new Master of Urban Technology coming to Michigan, built around a goal I find both timely and long overdue: giving designers the business acumen and entrepreneurial sensibility to actually make their ideas happen. It's a signal that the field is starting to name what's been missing.

This is the thread running through this week's episode of Practice Disrupted.

I sat down with Melvin Williams III, Digital Practice Leader at HKS, and what he described isn't really a story about technology. It's a story about why the architecture profession has a technology adoption problem that has almost nothing to do with technology. Melvin started his career at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where he first understood buildings not as objects, but as components within a much larger operational system. That systems perspective has shaped everything he's done since, including his years as a consultant watching firms that were fluent in project execution but couldn't build the bridge to a different kind of practice.

The conversation gets into what that bridge actually requires. And it's not more software.

🎧 Listen to episode 227 here.

Next week, I'm announcing something that connects directly to what's happening at Michigan. It's been quietly in development for a while, and I can't wait to share it.

Keep learning and growing,