Fifty-Two Years in the Making: Why I’m Finally Writing This Down
I earned my license in 1979. Now, it’s 2026.
That’s fifty-two years of stamping drawings, sitting across the table from hopeful owners and hardened contractors, and watching projects rise from the dirt. I’ve seen buildings come in beautifully clean, and I’ve watched others go spectacularly sideways. Over half a century, I’ve had a hand in building roughly $300 million worth of senior living, healthcare, restaurants, industrial, and Class-A office spaces.
I’m seventy-three now. Most architects my age have either retired or are pretending they have. I haven’t. But for the first time in five decades, I’m no longer running a practice in the relentless, daily-grind sense—chasing payroll, juggling a dozen projects, and fighting fires before my morning coffee. I’ve intentionally stepped back from that.
Instead, I’m doing what I probably should have started doing twenty years ago: I’m writing it all down.
The Reason I Waited
If you had asked me at fifty whether I had anything useful to share with younger architects, I would have laughed at you. I was too busy just surviving as one.
This profession consumes you. There’s rarely slack in the schedule for reflection—hell, there’s barely enough slack for lunch. The lessons you learn on one site get immediately poured into the foundation of the next before you’ve even had a chance to process them.
That’s the great trap of our practice. The people with the most valuable lessons to teach are usually the ones who can least afford the hours to teach them. And by the time they finally have the hours, many have lost the energy, the interest, or the thread altogether.
I refuse to lose the thread.
What This Newsletter Is
The Practicing Architect will be my weekly Field Notes to you. Expect short, plain-spoken pieces from someone who has actually done the work, rather than just theorized about it.
Here is what we’ll cover:
- The Reality of Practice: How the job actually works, bridging the gap between school, the AIA, and the real world.
- The Crucial Early Calls: The quiet, make-or-break decisions that determine a project’s fate—which almost always happen in the first three meetings.
- The Business of Architecture: The unglamorous essentials of contracts, fees, scope creep, and how to actually get paid.
- The AI Evolution: The massive shift happening right now as AI transitions from a novelty to a foundational tool inside AEC firms.
- Building for the Future: Real-time lessons from building AECLogix, the AI automation company I currently run for our industry.
- War Stories: The projects that went perfectly, and the ones that kept me up at night.
I’ll name names where it helps and stay anonymous where it doesn’t. But I will never write about anyone I’d be ashamed to look in the eye.
Who It’s For
This is for practicing architects—from eager interns to seasoned principals—who crave field perspective over academic theory. But it’s also for the contractors, owners, and developers sitting across the table from us. Because the truth is, the more clearly we understand how the other side thinks, the better our buildings become.
What I’m Not Going to Do
I’m not going to write design think-pieces. There are plenty of those, and most are written by people far more qualified for that conversation than I am.
I’m not going to chase the news cycle. If something genuinely affects practice—a code change, a tool that actually works, a court ruling that matters—I’ll write about it. Otherwise, I’m staying out of the noise.
I’m not going to pretend I have everything figured out. I’ve made every mistake an architect can make, and some of the best pieces in this newsletter will be about projects that went sideways and what I’d do differently the second time around.
And I’m not going to pretend AI is either a passing fad or an existential threat. It’s a tool. A good architect has always known how to pick up the right tool and put down the wrong one. What’s changing now is the size of the toolbox.
The Honest Reason
The real reason I’m writing this—the one underneath all the others—is that I have the time now, and I won’t always.
There are five more decades of architects coming up behind me who will run into the same problems I ran into. The lessons are simple enough to be useful, if someone bothers to write them down. Most of those lessons aren’t in any book. They live in the heads of people my age who don’t have the hours to put them on paper. With the daily grind off my plate, I finally do.
If you’ve been practicing a while and you want to push back on what I write here, even better. Comments are open. I read everyone. The whole point of Field Notes is that practice is a conversation, not a lecture.
One issue a week. Sometimes two.
Subscribe if any of that sounds like your kind of thing.