Architecture, And: From the Design Studio to the Operations Seat

A Firm owners, the move that cuts this year's tax bill have to be in place before December 31st, and most take months to set up. I use Gelt, who I partnered with on this episode, but also in my business, and they saved me over $10,000 in year one. Visit joingelt.com, that's J-O-I-N-G-E-L-T.com, to sign up for a consultation and mention Practice of Architecture for 10% off your first year. Welcome to Practice Disrupted, the podcast on the business of architecture and how it's changing. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, FAIA, NOMA, architect, angel investor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're running a firm, starting your career, or rethinking what practice looks like, this show gets into how architects actually change the way they work. Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted.

A Not many architects end up running companies. The training points you toward a license and a firm, and most of a career happens inside one. Today, I talked to an individual who does run a company. And the route he took to get there. Darren Pardeen grew up in West Virginia in a family of makers. His mother painted and quilted, his father built things with his hands, and he was good at math and science and art. He turned down Ohio State and Virginia Tech to stay in-state, which meant the only architecture program open to him was an architectural engineering degree at Fairmont State. He went to Virginia Tech for his master's, graduated into the Great Recession, and by his own account got lucky.

A Good portfolio, cheap to hire, a job in Roanoke, and then Studios Architecture in Washington. Then he left, and not because the recession pushed him out. He wanted to know where the money comes from. He took a job in New York with a real estate development company that called itself a builder, to learn the pro formas and the banking conversation his education had never once shown him. That was the turn. 9 years at Turner followed, running VDC and BIM in New York, and working as an MEP manager and superintendent across the Southeast on projects north of $2 billion. Then Hexagon, The Swedish software and sensors conglomerate he calls the biggest software company you have never heard of. This year, he co-founded Primera Works, where he is the chief operating officer.

A 12 people scanning buildings and turning what is actually there into BIM models, drawings, facade studies. He calls it digital alchemy, and a lot of it sells to architects. We get into what he had to unlearn, which is that architecture lets you iterate and refine forever, and business does not. We get into the owners sitting on billions of dollars of buildings who cannot tell you how many square feet they have. We get into his case that architects are badly undervalued, more capable than they give themselves credit for, and that this profession, it needs more of its people in business. He closes on where the technology takes us in 10 years and whether we will still be paying attention to the people inside it. Let's get into it.

B Hi, Darren. Welcome to the show. So glad to have you here.

C Thank you, Evelyn. It's an honor and privilege. Thank you.

B A little bit of an icebreaker.

A When someone outside of the AEC industry asks you, what do you do? What do you tell them?

C Oh, well, it's changed several times throughout my my career in life. But currently I basically just state how I'm earning my income currently. And that is as a co-founder of a multidisciplinary reality capture company. And that usually gets them intrigued enough to ask a couple more questions.

B And we'll get a little bit into that, but I wanted to start from the beginning for you because we always like tracing career paths and especially alternative career paths that end you up as COO of technology companies for all intents and purposes. What pulled you towards architectural design and the AEC field in general?

C To kind of answer that holistically, I have to go back a little bit to the beginning where I was a very curious kid, a little bit restless in that way, and ultimately just found through high school and, you know, was pretty good in school and found my way to a drafting table. which I got a lot of value out of. I really enjoyed drafting. So, my family is kind of an arts and crafts type family, always making things. My mother was a painter, into needlepoint and quilting and stuff. So, my dad built things with his hands and I was pretty apt in math and science and art as well. So, basically just kind of found my way naturally into a discipline that Combined a lot of that and satisfied some of my curiosity that I had as a child.

B So, a lot of people that we talk to on the show then take that interest and go into B.Arch and then M.Arch. You started off in architectural engineering, though. So, for people that don't fully understand the difference between, like, a B.Arch and an architectural engineering degree, can you explain that a little bit?

C Yeah. My perspective is just what it is based on my own degree. I think some other schools do it a little differently, but I was born and raised in West Virginia, so there's not a lot of architecture schools in West Virginia. So limitation of choices there initially. For whatever reason, I was hell-bent on staying in-state for school and undergrad, even though I was accepted to Ohio State and Virginia Tech at the time, wanted to stay in-state. So the only architecture program at the time was where I went at Fairmont State, and it was an architectural engineering degree. So it makes you think initially that it's probably more systems and process and construction heavy, but it, we actually had a heavy dose of liberal arts and art and philosophy exposure as well during that curriculum. So once the kind of the deep end of the ideological pool hit me, I was really hooked for architecture proper.

C And I had always planned on going to get a master's anyway. So, the first step was just with that architectural engineering degree.

B Yeah. And then you went on to Virginia Tech and you kind of landed yourself in the industry in a really, really hard time, right? During the Great Recession, 2007, 2008, 2009. What was it like trying to get a job and working in architecture for you at that time?

C I got lucky coming out of school when I was looking for my first job. I had a good portfolio. I really, really loved school, loved architecture. Every hour of the grind in the studio, I was that guy, really liked the discipline and the rigor. So, I developed a ton of skills, AutoCAD, rendering, Revit, had no shortage of marketable skills to be able to get picked up. And, Since it was my first job out of school, that was pretty cheap. So I was able to pick, you know, get a job there with Spectrum Design in Roanoke, Virginia pretty easily. So I got really lucky, really lucky there, but everybody's luck runs out sometimes.

C So it only lasted a little bit of time there with Spectrum.

B And then you ended up transferring to the builder side. I want to say before Turner, it looks like you were at a smaller builder. Was that out of necessity? Like what inspired that?

C Yeah, so I mentioned it a little bit ago. I'm just an inherently curious person. I don't know, it's like an intellectual ADHD in a way where I'll learn a little bit about something and then need to know more about it. So having an undergrad in architectural engineering and a master's of architecture, that's really good. And it's a lot to chew on. It's enough for a lot of people, but I was always inherently interested. In some of the broader aspects of the industry. One of them being, where does the money come from? How does a building form on paper? How do you have the conversations with bankers to build the pro formas? And what's the finance piece of that whole side of the industry, which coming out of a proper architectural education, you don't really get exposed to that side.

C I had even flirted with dual majoring with an MBA when I was at Virginia Tech. I didn't pursue it. But I always had the bent to understand, want to understand more holistically how the broader industry worked. So that's where I found myself in New York City working for Broadway Bushwick Builders, which was actually a real estate development company. They just named themselves a builder. So that scratched the itch for me to understand a little bit of that finance piece that was absent up until that point. So that's why I kind of took that position at that time. And was really excited to make that jump.

C By then I was living in New York City as well. So DC, I was living in DC with studios and then moved to New York City for the project management job.

B So then you were a developer. Did you kind of take that same curiosity when you went to the contractor side?

C Yeah, right? If I can design the thing on paper and understand where the pro forma supports the finance piece and then executing it, having the next logical step in my skillset was actually to get some construction experience. So, you know, it's serendipitous life, you know, pushes us in certain ways and it was just, I was just very lucky to have a great opportunity to work with Turner at that time. And yeah, so a lot of my architectural skills transferred directly Into the role that I, I sat in for Turner for the first several years of my career there.

B I think a lot of people, when they think about career transitions and what it means to, to move, especially out of your traditional practice, wonder about like the design side. And is there anything that you miss about being in an architecture firm that you just didn't find like on the real estate side or in Turner?

C Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think anyone who really liked architecture going through school probably has a similar, you know, retrospective look where you miss the creative aspect of it, right? You're young, you're just in school and you're drawing, you're building models, you're painting or in the woodshop doing whatever number of things that are expressive and creative. And you don't really find that anywhere else once you get into even the practicing architecture world, right? So, So to answer your question directly, yes, it, I still miss that to, to this day. And I'll, I'll complain to my wife and be like, I need to draw something. I haven't sat, you know, quietly and sketched something out for a long time, or just have an idea to like focus and manifest on. So, there are other ways that you get satisfaction as you, you know, mature in your career and you do build other things. But, but yeah, totally still, still miss the studio. Still miss architecture.

B What aspects of that education and those early years in a studio do you still find yourself leveraging? Now in a tech company? And we'll have to eventually get to what you're doing in a tech company.

C I think it's probably just the flexibility of mind that when you're an architect, or at least my upbringing in the profession and from school, had great mentors and professors both at Fairmont State and Virginia Tech. So, shout out to anybody listening. But, you know, architecture teaches you to think laterally in a very, very effective way that's not very common in the broader business world. So being able to sit and look at a blank sheet of paper and, you know, make an idea manifest itself through drawing and thinking like an architect is not so dissimilar to sitting down at a blank sheet of paper and trying to build a business, whatever it is, revenue targets for the next quarter or next year. You take the same kind of broad brushstroke general knowledge. Architects are extremely general in that sense. That was one of your earlier questions. And I think one of my favorite architecture firms and architects, Tom Main of Morphosis, said it best when he said the best architects are generalists.

C So yeah, I think in a nutshell, it's the flexibility and kind of intellectual creativity that transfers, or at least for me, transferred very well to any kind of adaptive problem-solving situation I was in. And, you know, a lot of collaboration. Architects are inherently collaborative. We're verbal. We can be verbose sometimes to a fault. So, I don't get out the thesaurus very often in a lot of business conversations, but just being able to articulate an idea and break complex things down into simple parts is also a very transferable skillset for architects.

B So, I want to kind of answer that question in reverse then. I feel like architects Architects are, are good at being generalists. I think we tend to overthink that a little bit and believe we know a lot more than we think we know sometimes about various different aspects. Anything you had to unlearn being on the opposite side, on the contractor side, or something that like, you know, if architects, if you knew this as an architect, you would've done it like working in a firm, you would've approached it very differently.

C Yeah. And I think part of it is just from experience. And my experience with firms was early in my career, so I wasn't a very mature person. So, if you ask an architect this question that's been practicing for 20 years, they may tell you something different. But for me, it was the kind of the firmness of decision-making. And I still carry a lot of that flexibility mindset. forward it into my current practices. But, you know, when no one— when you don't have a boss and no one's there to tell you what to do, you have to make the decisions on your own.

C So, there's not a lot of time to quantificate and iterate at times, and you literally just need to make decisions and go, where architecture studio and the design process can be very appealing and seductive in the way that you can just go and go and go and iterate and polish and refine. And that's not really the way the business world works at large. So that was one, one lesson that I had to learn pretty quickly getting into the construction management side and the, the real estate development side was not that it's all results driven, but you have to get to the point pretty quickly or you're just wasting people's time. And that, that was a little bit of a coming of age moment for me as a professional where It didn't bother me, but it was just an acknowledgement like, okay, this is a little bit different than just iterating on an idea or a design. Let's just get to the point, move the ball downfield. What's the end goal? Then it gets into the execution, the rigor piece that architecture teaches you, and then you just execute once you decide what it is you're doing. So, you can't really spend time iterating. You have to get to the point and make progress.

B We've kind of walked through the transition from very minimal time in traditional practice to the developer and construction side of things. It looks like technology comes into play around when you went to Hexagon. Is that correct?

C As a formal career path, yeah, that was a definitive departure from my past up to that point. And it would look on paper that it was maybe a divergence. But I've always had an interesting or very like severe pull towards technology. And to the extent that when I was in grad school, I built my own render farm and was freelancing doing 3D renderings back in 2007 and '08 and '09. So I can dabble in the deep end of that. And to do that back then was actually quite substantial. If you looked at the renderings, what I did then compared to what people are putting out today, very, very different quality. But hey, it was marketable skill and I was able to earn some income and learned a lot about how to build technology pipelines and productions and processing and a little bit of the networking piece that, you know, once you learn a thing, you don't unlearn it.

C So I learned that skill early on. But hiring into Turner as a VDC manager in that experience puts you right back into kind of technology and processing. So that was a pretty soft bridge from And a lot of architects, good architects I know worked at Turner as VDC engineers and managers. So it's a natural fit if you can let go of the design side and let that dream die. You know, VDC puts you into a position where you have access to so much information on a project. Your value is really off the charts. You have access to To the models and the drawings. And then if you get into the operations piece, scheduling coordination, and into the quality QA/QC constructability reviews, site safety planning, logistics planning, 4D, there's really a lot there that architects have a natural gravity to utilize the technological skill they already have and just layer on some of these other layers of construction.

C Operations that are important. And a lot of people really crush it as former architects working as VDC, some of the best ones I know. Even a colleague that I met in New York was a Virginia Tech alum similar to me. She was undergrad, I was grad school, so we didn't cross paths. But if there was any proof needed, that was kind of it enough. And she's now still doing really well at Turner in another role. But the path, there is a common thread for me technologically that it's always kind of been there. The irony is I really like drawing by hand, but was, was at a natural aptitude for the technology piece.

C So, you know, and we are where we are today in 2026, so it's not going away anytime soon.

B I mean, there's actually a common complaint from architects that they find a lot of younger people getting hired directly into the contracting side to work under like VDC managers essentially. And there are, getting paid more than architecture firms can afford to pay them.

C I'm not surprised. Construction has always had bigger margins and a little more enticing from that side. But yeah, and then you brought up Hexagon and how I ended up there was really kind of a manifestation of a lot of the experience I'd gathered at Turner initially as the BDC manager and then getting into construction operations. You you get to see all the problems on the contracting side, which are there's no shortage of anywhere on any project. They always have. It's basically construction is in a way just managing risk by solving problems that happen as you go. If it was formulaic, that would be easy. But every building is a prototype, and even if you have the same building footprint on a different site, you're going to have different problems.

C Doesn't matter. There are just so many variables in construction. So I got to see firsthand, I was a part of projects that exceeded over $2.1 billion for Turner, both in New York and then throughout the Southeast. And there's just a lot of lessons learned there of how information can be utilized more easily, how the digital twin is underutilized, how reality capture on project sites don't provide the value or impact that they could have. And there's just a lot of gaps missing that I was pretty frustrated with. And at that point in my career with Turner, I was there 9 years. I felt like I had enough operational experience, lessons learned, et cetera, to be able to make kind of the formal departure into the tech world, which is when I went to do consulting for Hexagon. And I really liked the the opportunity at Hexagon.

C Good firm. They treated me really well. But as a lot of big companies have the problem with inertia and turning the ship, they had similar problems. But if you looked at their tool sets, their software, their hardware and sensors, they own several subsidiaries like Multivista, Avere, Leica. Very big players in the AEC space. And the promise that I was given when I came on board there is, oh, Darren, you have all these construction problems, all these design problems. We have the toolset and we're building the final solution for architects and designers. And then I looked and did my research and I said, okay, it's a fair time to make that jump.

C And we'll see if this, you know, really kind of pans out. You know, a lot of moving parts. It's by no means a small challenge to try to solve that type of problem. And Hexagon's still doing really well. Very appreciative of all the time I had there. But at some point I just felt like I could go faster on my own with my own, my own team and my own partners and solve a different problem specifically.

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B As some of the subsidiaries of Hexagon, which I feel like the AC industry might be, especially the A part, might be more aware of, can you, for those of us who had, like, have no idea who Hexagon is, can you just kind of give us a brief overview of—

C Yeah, in a way, they're the biggest software company you've never heard of. They're a Swedish company conglomerate. In a way, they always considered themselves a peer to Autodesk, but they're reaching a little bit to be a peer of Autodesk. In certain verticals, they dominate, and in others, not so much. In AEC specifically, That's, that's where they're looking to establish a beachhead in the market and grow into the, the market that Autodesk has. So, yeah, they're, they're basically a software and sensors company headquartered out of Sweden that is looking to grow into North American markets. They're already established very well in, in EMEA, South America, and throughout Europe, but not so much in the US.

B I don't believe every architect has the entrepreneurship bug, like, in that sense. So, where do you get yours?

C Probably like pretty early on in childhood. My dad was always a proponent of, you know, earning money and being busy and providing value. So, uh, we had a big vegetable garden as a child and we'd have extra vegetables and I would be the kid at the side of the road with a sign that says, saving money for college, buy my tomatoes. That was probably 10 years old. I was doing that. I would say that is the, no pun intended, seed of where a little bit of that desire started. And, it just never really lost that. I guess another way to say it is life did not beat it out of me because I think a lot of us go through our formal education and environments tell us we need to be a certain thing and we kind of lose sight of a little bit of that childhood spark.

C I'm too stubborn to let it go. So, it kept popping back up, and here I am.

B I actually have been getting more recently a lot of conversations from mid-career professionals asking about changing careers, or what does it look like to really bet on yourself? Granted, some of these people have built up savings and a long enough runway to, like, take that bet on themselves. How anxiety-driven was it for you to go from working, you know, as an employee to deciding that you want to be the owner of a company?

C For me, not very much. Maybe it's just specific to my personality, but I'm pretty comfortable with a high level of ambiguity and risk, just as a personality. My wife is not. So, we constantly kind of, you know, go back and forth on the two because she's very much minded the other. And that's a beautiful thing. That's her That's her lane. You have to be comfortable with a certain level of uncertainty. And I think that's more psychological than financial.

C You can have runway, you can have a very long runway saved. And if you're unwilling to be able to kind of break the mental frames that you have that are surrounding the golden handcuff situation that we've all had, then it'll never really work anyway. So it's not the kind of thing that You can, in my opinion, you know, get halfway there and half commit to it. You have to literally be, be aware of the fact that this is a different lifestyle. It's a different way of thinking. You are the captain of your own ship and all kind of the, the heroic romantic version of that. There's the other side of it is the anxiety of making payroll and you have very, very firm commitments to the world, clients and, and employees that require you to bring your best every day. And You just have to be comfortable with having that level of responsibility.

C But I'd say if you're— anyone is interested in hanging out their own shingle or starting their own thing should try it at least, because I'm a big proponent of not having regrets, which is indicative of my career path, right? I didn't stick to the one path and I get curious and then I pursue that and then I pursue something else until I'm still kind of in a roundabout way have a fairly linear, although curving and jogging slightly left and right career path. I've stayed kind of in the same world in my mind, but on paper may not look like it to someone else. So yeah, if someone is looking to do it, I think you have to, or if they're curious about it, really think about it, plan it so that you have the runway you need. But then get a plan together, see what your network really looks like for sales. If you can actually maintain clients, how are you going to win clients? How are you going to market? What's your differentiator? Some very pragmatic business concerns come into play very quickly. So that, you know, if you have a Rolodex of clients that like you and would travel with you, then by all means, start your own thing and welcome to the party. Right? Everybody would know on their own if it's the right time. It's all about timing.

C So, but I would encourage everybody to do it and to believe in yourself. I think architects are by large extremely undervalued and much, much more capable than they give themselves credit for. Right? I think the profession, and, you know, everybody likes to knock on their own profession, but Architects specifically have a skillset and a versatility in the broader market that I think they should start applying. I think we need more architects in business for sure, right? It's always nice to talk to somebody that is, and I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but not a business person and is an engineer or Lord willing, a designer with a design background. They just see the world in a different way. And I think that's That's where a lot of companies with good cultures can come from.

B You've alluded very vaguely to what it is just through, I think, digital capture. What is PrimeraWorks?

C So PrimeraWorks is a, I like to say, a multidisciplinary reality capture firm. And if I'm being overly intellectual, I'll say we are digital alchemists, right? We take the reality and we make it digital. And we make useful stuff for building owners and designers, engineers, architects, and facility managers. Usually, we go out and scan and capture a place with advanced methods, tools, best-in-breed software, hardware, and turn that into BIM models, CAD drawings, PDFs, all kinds of analytical deliverables, floor flatness, elevation, facade studies, constructability reviews. The plethora of deliverables available by drone. And we basically do that for active construction, existing buildings, new projects and feasibility across the broader AEC space. So I say multidisciplinary in a way similar to how you may have a design firm that designs industrial stuff and they design buildings and they design cars. I've always wanted to have a parity company that paralleled that in a way where we designed multiple things, but we just now do reality capture in multiple different ways.

B So who are your primary— who's your primary audience or who's your primary target then?

C Yeah, so we're actually selling a lot into architects right now. There's a direct corollary between the need on the front end of the design process to know what an existing facility is actually built of, where the walls are, floors are, How it ties into survey and control, where utilities tie in, the height of the walls, etc. So architects have been a very, very fruitful vertical for us to sell into. Any building owner that has a capital project stack at maybe a master service agreement level, multiple facilities across the world or across the U.S., those are really our ideal clients where they have they have the asset, and you'd be surprised how many building owners. have billions of dollars worth of, of built assets can't answer you the simple question of how many square footage they have. And, you know, our firm is really built around solving that problem for them and making that information known to them. So existing facilities is a big vertical for us. We do active construction as well.

C Everything from pre-pour deck scans to elevator shaft verticality studies. So active construction is big as well. A lot of work for real estate developers. So, so that's generally the nexus that we operate in, our client list.

A So now your job title is COO.

B So what does like a day in the life of look like for you?

C Yeah, it's a good question. And since we're a new company, we did only officially launch at the beginning of this year. The idea was seeded March, April of, of last year, but we officially rolled out beginning of this year. So we're small and growing. Right now we're about 12. So my team is mostly half of that production field crew and the VDC and processing side. So, so a day in the life, it's kind of 2 different questions. If a business is established, the day in the life of a COO should be pretty simple.

C But in a startup, in a new company that's growing, we all wear a lot of hats. So, you know, this is a marketing event talking to you, and then I've had 4 sales calls ring in earlier today. And then this evening, I'll be doing QA/QC to make sure the SOPs we've established, standard operating procedures, are being followed from the field crew and the digital services team processing the data. So yeah, in a word, a day in the life changes daily. But basically, my charter here is to keep the operation running optimally, And, you know, control costs, ensure quality is adhered, and establish and maintain the standard operating procedures that we need to make sure the company runs. So, in a nutshell, that's what I do, but I end up doing a lot of other stuff since we're a new company.

B A lot of architects, you know, when they go off and start, even think about starting their own firm, I don't think realize the many hats a founder or somebody who is in startup mode can to where, what do you tell those individuals? Because I feel like a lot of people are like, I want more flexibility. The job isn't giving enough flexibility. I'm just going to go out and do it on my own. What is the reality of, like, being an owner of a startup and what year 1 looks like?

C Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I would say 2 words, cognitive load. You have stuff coming at you from every direction. And some of them are fires, some of them are fake fires, some of them is just real work you have to do. That is, it is an extremely heavy lift and it's not insurmountable. People do it all the time. People less capable than anyone listening on this call do this all day, every day.

C So it's not that there's an ability problem. I think there's just maybe a will to do the work. So there is a tremendous amount of flexibility required. I don't think you could do this without a certain level of maturity and belief in yourself. An immature person probably should not try to start a company, you know, before they're ready. It maybe takes a little bit of experience and life experience maybe to get you ready for that. But it's not uncommon in a day to do the work of my role, which is as a COO, then I'm also looking at finances and legal agreements and We're doing sales and sending out proposals, and there's a lot of just other stuff that comes up, right? HR problems, staffing problems, a lot of problems across the board. And you have to be flexible, supremely flexible, adaptable, and confident in your decision-making ability on the fly.

C So, if that all sounds like fun, then you should definitely, definitely come into the entrepreneurial world.

B At the very beginning, you said we don't necessarily get paid much and people misunderstand the value of the architect. So, What do you think we could be doing differently, or is there a way to position ourselves differently, or what do we do to begin to solve that?

C Yeah, I think in a high way, it's just starting to think about your ability to problem solve and synthesize information. Be more valuable to your clients across the board than just solving the building problem. This, and this is a little bit of an outside of the typical career track and path and training and development through the IDP of an architect, but It's all about networking and relationships. Start at an early age. As a young architect, I was horrible about networking and relationships. I was just going to design the world and the world would come to me because I wanted to design it. And well, the world had different plans for me. So relationships and fostering good solid relationships with the business people that you'll be working with will ingrain them ingrain you into their problem set and your ability to basically help advise and assist.

C And I say that broadly because architects have such a profound way of thinking about the world and problems themselves that I don't think there's another discipline out there that gives you the depth and breadth of bandwidth to be able to do that. Clients would definitely appreciate an architect's perspective, helping them solve their business problems beyond the delivery of a, you know, a building and a set of drawings. So, have more courage and lean forward into those types of conversations and relationships with your key clients.

B What would you say to a younger architect or maybe like a new graduate in their career who is not necessarily finding their happy place a firm and is interested in this type of technology, what should they be focusing on if they were to come and be interested in working for PrimeraWorks?

C Yeah, there's a lot of potential to earn or find your place in the world by just having skills. So, if you're curious about something, there's no reason not to skill up in it. And unlike when I started my career, there's no a shortage of information out there to learn whatever it is you want to learn. So, if there is something that is niche or outside of the general scope of architecture proper, just get curious about it, become a subject matter expert in it, and see if it's worth discovering for you. And I guess it comes back to a little bit of the belief in yourself. If you trust yourself and the path you're on as a young architect, I wish somebody told me this a little bit. you know, doesn't quite feel right for you, then, then be brave and, and take a step out. There's nothing wrong with that.

C There's a lot of ways to earn a very good living at the minimum out there in the world. And then beyond that, you can actually really maybe find, uh, find your true calling. So, to, to anybody out there in that position, which I was at one point, even though I, if you would've asked me in school, I was gonna be an architect and die on the drafting board. There, there is a big wide world out there that has a place for you and you should, should venture into that. into that world. Trust your gut and take the step out of the path. It's fine. You'll find a soft landing.

C Architects are extremely capable.

B It's interesting that you say, and I say this often too, people think like, oh, you've made these big jumps in your career, but you actually feel like personally there's a thread of your career. But looking back at your entire career arc, is there something you would've done differently, like a decision to move that you would've made Sooner?

C This is the question that really got me when I was looking at this. I don't know. I kind of go 2 ways because in one sense, I am where I am. That's the Lord's will. And I appreciate and respect that. If I'd taken any other path, I wouldn't be where I am. And I'm doing fine. I love life.

C I have a lot of good things going for me. But if I'm being super critical kind of in a retrospective way, of where I thought I wanted to go at the time, you know, I probably would've gotten that MBA when I was at Virginia Tech and double majored, and that would've put me on an entirely different trajectory or a different path. But, you know, I, I don't know. It's easy, so easy to second-guess yourself in retrospect. And when you're making the decision, when you're in the decision, sometimes that's okay. The best is it's a, it's an okay decision to make, whatever you need to make. But I, I don't really have any regrets at this point. Things have worked out well enough and I've gotten out of life what I need that I can't really say I would've done much else differently.

B 10 years out from now, maybe architects are leveraging, well, hopefully architects are leveraging what you're delivering more within what they're doing. What has changed from the profession and what has remained the same?

C Looking 10 years ahead, what changes and what remains?

B Yeah.

C Yeah, I think the technology will do what technology does and it'll make things faster and maybe better. It'll definitely make it faster. I guess we'll look back in 20 years and see if the 10-year mark was any better. But I think the buildings will be delivered at speed in a more coordinated fashion. Just, Across the board from every discipline, civil, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, architecture, structural. I think vendors and subcontractors are going to start rolling into the decision-making process earlier. I think you're going to see a pretty profound fusion of manufacturing and logistics planning integrating into architecture, engineering, and construction deliverables, meaning project lifecycle analysis, Does this big data center in, you know, suburban Atlanta really need to be $4 billion and take 5 years to build? Right? I think the technology will shorten durations for project execution quite a bit. And you're just going to see a mass synthesis of the information we've already created within the industry start to actually compound and provide tangible benefit at the end of the day.

C And at the end of the day, architects are still just designing buildings and then contractors are still just constructing them, right? So I think that's the lower-hanging fruit. What's really curious to think about is how that benefits all of us socially, economically, environmentally. Where can we be in the next 10 years? And I don't really know. I think building stuff faster, better is phenomenal, but I'm curious to see where we land, if we can keep touch of the other humanistic aspects of our profession. That's really the challenge. How do you keep pace with the power of the technology and still keep your hand on the touchstone that we're all human beings?

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Practice Disrupts. Want more of this between episodes? Start with Practice Rebuilt, our weekly newsletter on the business of architecture at practiceofarchitecture.com/newsletter. And when you're ready to stop reading about change and start testing it in your own firm, get on the list for The Lab at practiceofarchitecture.com/lab. We'll see you next week for a new conversation on change.

C Bye.

A Change in the profession.