Capital Program Delivery
The Change Order Is a Symptom
In 2015 a client of mine was defrauded by a general contractor. The drawings were sound. The contract was standard. The failure happened in the space between the two, where the architect's authority ends and the owner is left alone with whoever holds the builder's license. I founded S5 Construction that year because I could not fix that gap from the architect's side of the table.
Holding both licenses changed how I read every project document. A change order is not a billing event. It is a record of a question nobody answered during design, a condition nobody verified during preconstruction, or a scope boundary nobody owned. Across 400 projects and more than $100 million in capital value, running estimating, constructability review, and design under one accountable authority has kept change orders about 15 percent below industry benchmarks. That number is not a sales claim. It is what happens when the person who drew the detail also has to build it and answer for the cost.
Institutions buy this lesson the expensive way, one dispute at a time, because their delivery model splits design intent, field execution, and fiscal accountability across three parties with three sets of incentives. The fix is not a better contract form. It is putting someone in the owner's chair who has personally carried all three obligations and knows where each one hides its risk.
AI Policy & Digital Practice
Writing the Rules for AI Before the Rules Write Us
The AIA's AI working group spends less time on what the tools can do than on what happens when they are wrong. Who carries the liability when an AI-assisted detail fails? What does a standard of care mean when the model that produced the drawing cannot testify? Those questions decide whether the profession adopts these tools with confidence or waits for the first courtroom to decide for us.
I came to that table as a practitioner, not a futurist. I have spent 24 years deciding which platforms earn a place in a working firm, weighing license cost, implementation burden, and workflow disruption against project revenue. Most of what I have learned about technology adoption came from watching tools fail in the field, and from teaching plan reading to more than 500 contractors across Mississippi who have to build from whatever the software produces.
The firms and platform companies that will do well in the next decade are the ones treating professional standards as a design constraint, not an obstacle. The liability frameworks being drafted now will outlast every model version on the market. Getting them right matters more than getting them first.
Historic Preservation & Capital Strategy
A Historic Building Is a Capital Asset, Not a Museum Piece
Spengler Corner sat mostly empty in downtown Jackson for years, a block built in 1885 that once held Sambo Mockbee's office. When we finished the adaptive reuse, it went from 5 percent to 95 percent occupancy in under a year, qualified more than $3 million in historic tax credits, and the owner's property value rose roughly 500 percent. Nothing about that outcome required treating the building as a relic. It required treating it as an underperforming asset with an unusual financing tool attached.
I have served eleven years on the City of Jackson Historic Preservation Commission, four of them as president, and rewrote the city's historic ordinance to work as an economic development instrument. The lesson from roughly 600 design reviews is consistent: preservation fails when it is framed as restriction, and succeeds when the review process helps an owner find the version of their project that qualifies for credits, satisfies the Secretary of the Interior's Standards, and still pencils.
Universities and institutions with historic building stock face this at portfolio scale. The buildings that anchor institutional identity are usually the ones deferred longest, because nobody on the facilities side is fluent in both tax credit qualification and phased renovation inside occupied structures. That fluency is buildable. It just has to be treated as a capital competency rather than a curatorial one.