Los Angeles, California · AIA, LEED AP BD+C, DBIA
The most useful machine in the studio
won’t be the one that draws.
It will be the one that asks.
Currently
Principal and Senior Project Designer at HOK in Los Angeles. Licensed architect, LEED AP BD+C, DBIA.
Nineteen years at HOK, mostly on airports, hospitals and laboratories — buildings that are not permitted to stop working — has left me more interested in how design decisions get made than in the images that announce them.
The argument
I think AI is going to change design work meaningfully — but not in the way the renderings suggest. The interesting future isn’t a machine that produces options faster. It’s a machine that functions as a critical voice inside the process: a partner that checks whether you have actually answered what the client asked for, and that surfaces the opportunities you haven’t noticed yet.
Design has always been recursive. You propose, you test, you learn what the proposal was really about, you revise. The value of a good collaborator is that they tighten that loop. That is the standard I hold these tools to — not novelty, not speed for its own sake, but whether the loop between intention and evidence gets shorter and more honest.
This site is where I work that out in public: theory, technology, and material other architects can use.
The other half of it
And yet a hundred aluminum boxes
in a shed in Marfa satisfy no requirement at all.
Judd, Newman, Turrell — for all three the encounter is the work, not the image of it, and none of it can be checked. A building can satisfy every measure we know how to take and still be nothing to stand in. We have all helped make one.
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.
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 for architects navigating design in the age of AI.
- 04Built WorkSelected projects, and the reasoning behind them.
Recent writing
All essaysJudd'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 — and 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.