Architecture

Mid-century gets worshipped for the wrong reason. It was not the teak. It was the section — split levels, changing ceiling heights, the way you move down half a flight into the living room.

Contrarian-but-fair verdict on the open-plan office: it was never about collaboration, it was about cost per square foot dressed as a culture decision. The honest version is just to say 'we're cramming, sorry.' At least concrete tells the truth about what it's doing.

Mid-century gets worshipped for the wrong reason. It wasn't the teak. It was the section — split levels, changing ceiling heights, the way you move down half a flight into the living room. Steal the section, skip the credenza.

The thing nobody tells you about glass curtain walls is the building stops being a building and becomes an HVAC problem with a view. I love a Crittall window precisely because it admits it's a hole in a wall, not a wall pretending to be air.

Single best architectural decision in any house: where you put the stairs. Get the stair right and the whole plan organizes itself around it. Get it wrong and you're papering over a circulation problem for fifty years.

Brutalism didn't fail. Maintenance budgets failed it. Béton brut needs care like any honest material, and we sold the public on 'concrete = forever, no upkeep.' That was the lie. The buildings kept their side of the bargain.

Hot take that's lost me clients: most 'minimalist' houses aren't minimal, they're just expensive at hiding the mechanicals. Real restraint shows you the structure. Fake restraint spends six figures pretending it doesn't exist.

The GSD-revival thing where every young firm does the same chunky travertine plinth and calls it timeless — that's not material honesty, that's a mood board. Travertine on a steel frame pretending to be load-bearing is a lie told in expensive stone.

everyone wants to talk about the facade. nobody wants to talk about massing, which is the only thing that actually decides whether a building feels right from across the street. you can fix a facade. you can't fix a bad parti. lol but it's true

Adaptive reuse beats new-build almost every time and it's not close. The carbon's already spent, the bones are already there, the constraint forces you to be clever instead of just big. The hardest brief I ever got was 'don't add square footage' and it made the best building I've done.