Los Angeles, California · AIA, LEED AP BD+C, DBIA
A hundred aluminum boxes in two sheds in Marfa satisfy no requirement at all.
A building can satisfy every measure we know how to take and still be nothing to stand in. We have all helped make one.
Currently
Principal and Senior Project Designer at HOK in Los Angeles. Licensed in New York and California, LEED AP BD+C, DBIA.
Nineteen years at HOK, mostly on airports, hospitals and laboratories. Buildings that are not permitted to stop working. That has left me more interested in how design decisions get made than in the images that announce them.
What the work is for
Judd, Newman, Turrell. For all three the encounter is the work rather than the image of it. Nothing about it can be checked, and that is not a defect in the work. It is what the work is.
That is the half of architecture I care most about, and it is the half no method reaches. Everything else I am good at, the delivery expertise and the checking and the documents, exists to buy the standing to insist on it in a meeting where I cannot prove I am right.
This site is where I work that out in public: art, architecture, and the technology now arriving between them.
And yet, what is arriving
The most useful machine in the studio won’t be the one that draws. It will be the one that asks.
I think AI is going to change design work meaningfully, but not in the way the renderings suggest. The interesting future is not a machine that produces options faster. It is one that works as a critical voice inside the process, checking whether you have answered what the client actually asked for and surfacing the opportunities you have not noticed yet.
Which is why I hold two tests rather than one. Does it shorten the loop between intention and evidence, and does it leave room for what cannot be checked? Rigor isn’t the opposite of art. Rigor is what buys you the standing to insist on the unjustifiable thing.
Where the three meet
Welcoming is not testable. “A person arriving without an appointment can see the reception desk from inside the entry doors without turning” is testable, on a plan, in about four seconds. It does not mean the same thing. It is not a definition of welcoming and it must never be written as one.
Art is why the aspiration cannot be measured and must not be replaced. Architecture supplies the door, the sightline and the plan, without which there is nothing to check in four seconds. Technology is why the distinction now costs something, because the checkable half of the work just got cheaper and the other half did not.
Take any one of the three away and the paragraph stops working. That is what I mean by an intersection, and it is the shape everything else on this site is trying to reach.
Sections
- 01TheoryEssays on art and the built environment: what buildings argue, and who they argue for.
- 02Design & TechnologyThe seam where computation meets judgment. Tools treated as material, not as instruments.
- 03Practice ResourcesWorking material a practice can adopt. Craft first, then method, then the policy questions nobody has written down yet.
- 04Built WorkSelected projects, and the reasoning behind them.
- 05InfluencesFive artists I measure the work against, and notes from going to see things. None of them are architects, which is the point.
Recent writing
All essaysThe Floor Has Risen
August 19, 2026
A junior designer once handed me a code report that was entirely correct and completely unconsidered. I have been thinking about it ever since, because the thing that made it inadequate is the only thing we have left to sell.
Judd's Objection
August 18, 2026
I argued that a tool earns its place by shortening the loop between intention and evidence. Then I went back to Marfa, and the boxes had a reply.
The Tighter Loop
August 17, 2026
The tools arriving in our studios are being sold as production. The ones worth having will behave more like a critic. The difference is not a feature, it's a stance.
Get in touch
If you’re working on something at the edge of design and technology, or you think I have this wrong, I’d like to hear it.