Meet the new boss

Today, I wind up eight years working as a project architect for Acton Ostry Architects. As of tomorrow, 29 June 2013, my full-time employer is The Office of Ryan McCuaig. We¹ make software for architects, engineers and contractors.

The provisional motto is “Computing for making better buildings.”

Like most fields right now, building design and construction has never before had so much data available, and such an uneven distribution of skills and tools that might let us make sense of it and free our thinking for higher-order problems. Even if it were tenable now (i.e., it isn’t), is only becoming less so to waste brainpower on tedium better handled by these infernal yet stupendously amazing machines.

I’ve been an architect-in-training and then registered architect on the sharp pointy end of getting buildings built since 1999, and–along with having earned a degree in computer science–I’ve worked hard to become a skilled web, Mac/iOS and CAD plugin developer alongside that. So, I’m thinking I know a thing or two about the intersection of buildings and computers.

If you also care deeply about making buildings, know we could be doing it better and want to talk about the possibility of working with ORM, please get in touch.

I want to end with a thank-you to Mark Ostry, Russell Acton and my talented colleagues at AOA, and to my former employer Bruce Carscadden, for the opportunities, support, trust, banter, mentorship, cameraderie, and for showing me what relentlessness in pursuit of design excellence really looks like.

Fri 28 Jun 2013