Loading...

PODCAST

TRXL

TRXL is the definitive podcast on technology and the architecture and engineering professions — and the longest-running. 200+ episodes. Five years. Conversations with the founders, researchers, designers, and firm leaders who are actually shaping how architecture gets practiced. Hosted by Evan Troxel, a licensed architect with over 25 years in AEC, TRXL is built for architects, BIM managers, design technologists, computational designers, and firm leaders who want to stay ahead of where the

arts design

All Episodes

01:17:27

243: Your Firm Is an Institution

TRXL ·

2026/10/01

Espy Harper, David Spehar, and Anthony Hauck join the podcast to talk about data-driven design for healthcare, where a missed clearance or a misplaced outlet stays built into a hospital for decades. We explore why firms treat every project like their first, how as much as 90% of room requirements can be templated and reused, and how a live link between a room-data database and a 3D planning tool lets one equipment change ripple through every affected room. We also get into bringing nurses and

en

02:26:39

242: Designing for 100 Years… in 100 Seconds?

TRXL ·

2026/09/24

I asked the same partners you heard last episode two questions back to back. When a vendor says AI, do they mean autocomplete, a copilot, or something that acts on its own, and does the distinction matter to you? And further out, can you describe a building in plain English and get something real back?Oliver Goldman at Autodesk isn't sure the three terms mean much beyond branding, and explains why Revit's MCP server started read-only when both you and the agent hold the pen. Greg Demchak at Bentley

en

02:20:32

241: From Autocomplete to Agent: Where AEC Actually Is

TRXL ·

2026/09/17

Every company in this arc has AI in their marketing. So I asked all of them the same question: in a real firm today, what can it actually do, and what can't it?Michael Jansen and Prasanta Bose at TwinMaster open with why firms resist adopting new tools at all, and Roderick Bates at Chaos separates real capability from social-media hype using a story about his son and a magnet-fishing YouTube video. Holger Kreienbrink at Graphisoft wants AI on the tedious tasks, not the creative ones. Marty Rozmanith

en

01:59:06

240: I've Got to Get My Project Out on Friday

TRXL ·

2026/09/03

Two questions close out the BIM 2.0 arc. When a tool generates a design for you, where does its output stop and your judgment start? And what does interoperability actually deliver once you strip away the vendor promises?Roderick Bates at Chaos draws the clearest line anybody in this series draws about what a generative tool should not be allowed to do — his team won’t let AI touch geometry or materials without the designer’s direct input, because that’s “the bridge too far.” Campbell Yule pushes

en

03:07:37

239: You're Not Going Home Early

TRXL ·

2026/08/27

Episode one ended with the pitch: new tools give architects their day back. Episode two asks the harder question. If a firm stops running one platform and starts running ten, what happens to twenty years of muscle memory while that shakes out?I put some version of that question to nine voices building and using the BIM 2.0 stack. Gavin Nicholls calls the sunk cost a serious blocker and describes his own Revit add-in work as "polishing the prison bars from the other side." Carl Christensen at

en

01:38:07

238: Half Your Day Isn't Design

TRXL ·

2026/08/20

The first episode of The Next AEC Tech Stack opens on the number nobody wants to say out loud. Randall Stevens of AVAIL puts the mundane overhead of an architect's day at somewhere near fifty percent, and he admits it's hard to measure because it disappears in seconds and minutes at a time. Looking for a file. Marking up the same PDF three people already marked up. Waiting on a license.Across this episode I put one question to ten people building and using the BIM 2.0 tools: does this let architects

en

01:27:10

237: 'The Interns Will Have Interns', with Phil Read

TRXL ·

2026/08/14

Phil Read joins the podcast to talk about where human judgment belongs in an AI-assisted design process. We explore his case for the infamous sawtooth diagram (the thing BIM was supposed to eliminate) as the place where experience gets injected. We get into AI as an intern rather than an oracle, why firms are using it to study materials and lighting instead of generating building form, and why automated documentation is fast but not yet predictable. We close on AEC Acoustics, the 50-person event

en

01:22:19

236: 'No One Can Own the Law', with Garrett Reynolds

TRXL ·

2026/08/11

Garrett Reynolds joins the podcast to talk about UpCodes' decade-long fight to keep building codes free and public. We explore the string of lawsuits UpCodes has faced from the International Code Council, ASTM, and other code publishers since 2017, the Supreme Court and circuit court rulings that established no one can own the law, and the Pro Codes Act, the industry-backed legislation now trying to accomplish in Congress what the publishers couldn't win in court.This episode is especially relevant

en

01:19:13

235: 'How Olson Kundig Scaled AI Adoption Across a...

TRXL ·

2026/07/28

Marlene Chen and Blair Payson join the podcast to talk about how a firm known for design, not technology, actually puts new tools to work. We explore the office-wide crit they ran to surface friction points across every role and experience level, the shift that took their visualization team from three people to effectively 150, and the messy reality of adoption: rogue folders on personal desktops, a surprise surge in software licenses, and the slow work of change management inside a 300-person

en

01:38:58

234: 'Here's to the Crazy Ones, AEC Edition', with...

TRXL ·

2026/07/14

Håvard Vasshaug joins the podcast to talk about what happens to building data after the architect hits save, and why so much of it dies inside the authoring tool. We explore why it makes no sense to force construction, cost, and scheduling data into Revit, how live model changes can flow straight to contractors and owners without a BIM license, and why six-week-old information is the reason projects run over time and over budget. Håvard also gets into architects' instinct to guard their files, the

en

01:32:55

233: 'Spaces For People To Kiss', with Mariusz...

TRXL ·

2026/07/01

Mariusz Hermansdorfer joins the podcast to talk about turning an internal tool into a product for the whole profession. We explore how he spun Jifto out of Henning Larsen as the firm's first ever tech spin-off, why letting go of corporate control was the thing that made it possible, and how a Rhino plugin can put wind, stormwater, and microclimate analysis in the hands of architects who never had a specialist team to call.This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and computational

en

02:00:32

232: 'Bringing Joy Back to Architecture', with...

TRXL ·

2026/06/16

Tatjana Dzambazova joins the podcast to talk about why the AEC industry deserves a brand new tool, one built for AI from the ground up instead of bolted onto software designed 25 years ago. We explore the end of what she calls the terror of technological expertise, the difference between hoarding artifacts and capturing the process behind a building, and why she believes AI could bring joy back to architecture rather than grinding it down to cost and speed.This episode is especially relevant for

en

01:07:54

231: 'Architects: Reclaim Control in CA', with Jack...

TRXL ·

2026/06/09

In this special partner episode, Jack Sadler joins the podcast to talk about the phase of a project where architects quietly lose control: construction administration. We explore why CA became a cost center instead of a profit center, what happens when architects run their work out of someone else's software, and how AI can automate the routing, logging, and paperwork without ever touching the professional judgment that actually matters. Jack makes the case that CA is where design intent gets

en

01:23:09

230: 'Rooms for Storytelling', with Keith Gerchak

TRXL ·

2026/05/19

Keith Gerchak joins the podcast to talk about the double life he's been living for thirty years: designing spaces for storytelling as the Design Principal at TheatreDNA, and inhabiting those spaces as an actor and filmmaker. We explore what makes performing arts buildings unlike any other building type, the surprising parallels between directing a feature film and managing an architecture project, and how technology — from Revit to AI — can either serve a story or quietly strip it of meaning.This

en

01:23:47

229: Campfire Series - 'The CGarchitect Story', with...

TRXL ·

2026/05/06

In this special Campfire Series episode, Jeff Mottle joins the podcast to tell us the full story of CGarchitect — from a side project launched in 2001 to a 21-year platform, a sale to Chaos Group, and everything in between: the 3D Awards, CGschool, the evolution of archviz from expert-only technical gatekeeping to storytelling, and what COVID revealed when it stripped away all the travel and in-person events that had been keeping him going. We also get into his four years at NVIDIA, the AI wave he'd

en

01:24:23

228: 'What Did You Actually Do Today', with Steve...

TRXL ·

2026/04/28

Steve Burrows CBE joins the podcast to talk about why the construction industry keeps rewarding dysfunction instead of fixing it. We explore the gap between selling time and creating value, why startups keep failing to change construction by trying to change all of it at once, and what the collapse of Katerra actually taught the people who were in the room when it happened.This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and engineers who feel trapped in the cycle of meetings, emails, and change

en

01:36:40

227: 'Are We Horses or Are We Coal', with Rachel Riopel

TRXL ·

2026/04/14

Rachel Riopel joins the podcast to talk about why enterprise transformation keeps failing in AEC and what it actually takes to make it stick. We explore the gap between running pilots and operationalizing technology across an organization, why the industry's obsession with productivity as the primary metric is a race to the bottom, and how cybersecurity is quietly becoming one of the biggest friction points in AEC collaboration.This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, digital practice

en

01:49:58

226: 'Think Slower to Move Faster', with Charles...

TRXL ·

2026/04/07

Charles Portelli joins the podcast to talk about what you learn when you leave architecture to build software, and what you bring back when you return. We explore the gap between how buildings are designed and how they're actually fabricated, why the most valuable work inside a large firm is often the least glamorous, and what it would take to build an AI-powered project assistant that actually knows everything about a job.This episode is especially relevant for design technology leaders, firm

en

01:17:16

225: 'A Nuclear Bomb Moment', with Antonio González...

TRXL ·

2026/03/31

Antonio González Viegas joins the podcast to talk about the open source infrastructure layer he's building for BIM software and why the barriers that have protected legacy vendors for decades are collapsing faster than most people realize. We explore why every BIM company has been forced to reinvent the same foundational technology from scratch, how That Open Company is giving those pieces away under an MIT license, and what happens when AI compresses years of development into weeks. Antonio coined

en

03:18:35

224: 'Everything Is Going to Change', with Martyn Day

TRXL ·

2026/03/24

Martyn Day joins the podcast to talk about the forces quietly dismantling how architecture and engineering work gets done, and how it gets charged for. We explore how AI-driven solvers are compressing months of project coordination into hours, why BIM 1.0 is becoming a drawing conduit as open SDKs erode software moats, and what layered cloud and AI token costs mean for firms reconsidering where their project data lives.This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders and technology directors who

en

252 results

Similar Podcasts

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Eliana Benavides

The Moth

The Moth

About Art

Heidi Zuckerman

Stage Whisper

Andrew Cortes and Hope Bird

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a