Can strict technical requirements and elegant design coexist? Jay Siebenmorgen says yes. As Design Partner at NBBJ, Jay has spent over 30 years working on hospitals, research labs, and higher education buildings — some of the most technically demanding spaces in architecture — and made beauty a non-negotiable.

Jay walks through the exploratory design process behind 325 Binney Street — Moderna's Kendall Square headquarters — including the massing studies, zoning constraints, and the five-story atrium his team fought to carve into a famously deep floor plate. He also talks through Mass General's new Ragon Building, a 1.4-million-square-foot academic medical center more than a decade in the making, and the McLean Hospital project that proves great design doesn't require a big budget — just discipline.

Along the way, Jay gets into what makes institutional design different: buildings that have to function under enormous technical and regulatory pressure while still feeling humane, beautiful, and calming to the people inside them. He also opens up about teaching graduate design studios for over a decade, what mentorship has taught him about running a 650-person firm, and the leap — three years ago — from top designer to partner, and everything that leap forced him to learn that architecture school never did.

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When James von Klemperer joined Kohn Pedersen Fox, the firm was still early in its story: growing quickly, defining its culture, and creating real opportunity for young architects. Today, the firm has reached 50 years in business, with hundreds of employees across nine global offices, and James has helped carry forward a culture built around authorship, opportunity, and the belief that great architecture is never the work of a single voice.

In this week's conversation, James walks Rens through the moments shaping KPF’s legacy, from its early founders to its expansion into London and Asia, where the firm has designed across some of the world’s densest and most complex cities. He explains how KPF’s work is rooted in connection: between buildings and streets, towers and transit, public space and private development, and architecture and the larger life of the community. This ideology runs through projects like One Vanderbilt in New York, Lotte World Tower in Seoul, Waterline in Austin, and Changi Airport's Terminal 5 in Singapore.

James also shares what it takes to lead a global architecture firm without stepping away from design itself. KPF’s culture, as he describes it, is still shaped by architects who design, lead, teach, debate, and stay close to the forces changing cities around the world. From succession and authorship to AI, agility, public-private partnerships, and the future of urban density, today's episode offers a rare look inside of architecture’s most influential visionaries.

Thank you for joining the Design Development community. Subscribe to capture insight from the latest episodes dropping every Wednesday.

Our goal is to help people like you identify opportunities for growth by sharing the journey of industry leaders. There is no one path. Success isn't a straight line. There is something to learn from everyone's story. Let's go!

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Paul Zeckser didn’t follow the traditional path into construction. He’s not an architect, engineer, or contractor – instead, he built a career in tech. But as the Co-Founder and CEO of LightTable, he is solving one of construction’s most expensive problems: helping project teams catch drawing and coordination issues before they become RFIs, change orders, and delays.

LightTable was built around an issue Paul believes is bigger than effort or attention to detail. Project teams are managing hundreds of drawing sheets, thousands of pages of specifications, and countless cross-disciplinary decisions. Even strong, experienced teams can miss technicalities or miscoordinate details. LightTable uses AI to review drawings and specs during pre-construction, identify errors and omissions, and rank the issues most likely to create costly problems once construction begins.

Before LightTable, Paul spent years building products by getting close to the end user. At HomeAdvisor, this meant learning directly from contractors and understanding where software helped, where it failed, and where the pain points were for the customer. LightTable carries this same approach into their technology: listen closely to your customers, understand their workflows, and develop accordingly.

Inside this week’s episode:

• How LightTable is solving pre-construction risk, not just speeding up document review
• What a missed coordination detail on a multifamily project reveals about the true cost of drawing errors
• The nerve-wracking sales process that Paul says earns clients' trust
• What's next after LightTable’s $22M Series A as they enter the next stage of AI in construction

Thank you for joining the Design Development community. Subscribe to capture insight from the latest episodes dropping every Wednesday.

Our goal is to help people like you identify opportunities for growth by sharing the journey of industry leaders. There is no one path. Success isn't a straight line. There is something to learn from everyone's story. Let's go!

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Find out more at https://h-o.engineering/podcasts/