Honestly, some of my best productivity improvements have come from workspace experiments where I spent maybe $200 total. I’m not kidding. While people obsess over thousand-dollar ergonomic setups and smart…
I spent three hours last month crawling around a house in Fremont examining what looked like walls made from compressed mushrooms. The homeowner, this software engineer named David, kept following…
Working as a planner in Seattle, you’d think I wouldn’t have much to say about desert landscaping. But here’s the thing – I spend a lot of time thinking about…
Standing in my friend Maria’s newly renovated kitchen last Tuesday, I couldn’t help but notice the irony. Here was someone who’d spent months agonizing over whether her countertops should be…
Three months ago I found myself in a materials lab in Tucson, watching concrete change colors like some kind of mood ring for buildings. I’d driven down there expecting another…
Last week I was stuck in traffic outside a brand new development in Renton, watching move-in trucks unload furniture into houses that are going to financially drain these families for…
I’ve been an urban planner for over a decade now, focused mostly on how we move around cities and where we put buildings. But about three years ago, I stumbled…
Digging through old planning documents in Seattle’s archives always makes me think about how dramatically our approach to building has changed. Last month I was researching development patterns from the…
Last Tuesday I was grabbing coffee at my usual spot in Capitol Hill, watching yet another crew install what looked like half of Home Depot’s HVAC section on a new…
So here I am, supposed to be an expert on sustainable building practices, and my neighbor catches me completely off guard with what should’ve been a simple question. “Marcus, can…