Arcfluence - The Architecture and Design Podcast

Architecture shapes where people learn, work, gather and pray. A gathering space can help people find connection and support. An everyday service can make a neighborhood easier to live in. The question isn't only what a building should look like. It's what the place could help someone do.

On the Arcfluence Podcast, Joshua Zinder, AIA, LEED AP, NCARB, founder and managing partner of Joshua Zinder Architecture + Design (JZA+D), joins Arcfluence co-founders Nick Karakaian, Assoc. AIA, and Paul Fatkins, AIA, NCARB, to talk about what architecture makes possible for people, and what it takes to keep doing that work.

They discuss community projects, the relationships behind them, and the practical work of sustaining a small architecture firm, including peer support through the AIA Small Firm Exchange.

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Tony Celebrezze and Mark Dravillas from the City of Columbus join Nick and Paul to discuss Zone In, the city’s zoning code update.

They cover the corridor changes already in place, what Phase II proposes, and what property owners should check before buying or planning a project.

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Architect and educator Frank Jacobus, AIA, joins Nick and Paul Fatkins for a conversation about the relationship between architectural education and everyday practice. Frank is director of the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University and co-principal of SILO AR+D.

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Blake Gibbons, Chief Revenue Officer at RunDiffusion, joins Nick and Paul to explore generative visualization in architecture and design - from faster visual studies and client-generated imagery to matching an image’s polish with the design’s maturity.

They discuss how firms can manage tools, costs, and governance without chasing every new product - and how architects translate visual preferences into buildable projects, with drawings and specifications recording accepted decisions.

In this episode of The Arcfluence Podcast, Bart Shaw, FAIA, principal and co-founder of Ibañez Shaw Architecture, joins the team for a conversation about what good design is ultimately responsible for. They discuss working within real budgets and constraints, considering the long-term cost of design decisions, coordinating architecture from concept through construction, and designing buildings around the people who will use, maintain and live with them for decades.

Columbus continues to grow, and the headline numbers are good. The metro is adding people, it remains short on housing, and the median sale price has roughly doubled in a decade. Any one of those figures is a reasonable argument for putting money into central Ohio.

None of them tell you what will happen on your parcel.

That gap - between the number everyone quotes and the block you are actually buying on - is where money quietly gets lost. Not at the moment of purchase, and rarely dramatically. It shows up later, in a property that sits, in an exit priced against comparables that were never really comparable, in a pro forma built on an appreciation rate that applied to a region and not to a street.

This is a guide to reading the market at the scale of the decision: what the citywide figures mean, what they conceal, and the questions that close the distance between the two.

Much of what follows we worked through on the Arcfluence Podcast with Jim Ross, a licensed agent with Red 1 Realty who has spent more than eleven years working almost exclusively with investors. He pulls central Ohio market data weekly, and he is less interested in any single figure than in what the numbers say when read against each other.

The kitchen is rarely about the kitchen. It is the room a family actually lives in. Nick and Paul sit down with Tyler Swartzmiller and Amy Fix of Haus Studio, the Columbus design-build studio behind the cabinetry in Nick's own kitchen, for a warm, lively conversation about designing the room at the center of a home.

They get into the 90/10 rule (design for the ninety percent of life that is just your family, not the ten percent that is entertaining), what a designer is actually doing in the first meeting, storage as programming rather than volume, why appliances are disappearing behind panels, the shift back toward natural stone and the worker-safety story driving it, and why "invest" beats "budget" when a home is the largest asset most people own.

Guests: Tyler Swartzmiller, Principal Designer and Founder, and Amy Fix, Senior Designer, of Haus Studio. See their work at hausstudiodesigns.com or @hausstudiocolumbus.

More conversations on design, building, and Central Ohio at arcfluence.com/podcast.

Nick and Paul are back from the 2026 AIA National Conference in San Diego with a full debrief. They start with the keynotes that stood out: a celebrated culinary host on design as a curated experience, Charlene Li on winning with AI as a leadership and culture challenge rather than a magic button, and the World Bank's Sameh Wahba on designing for a changing climate - building for the next century, not just the next code cycle. From there they get into the Small Firm Exchange and what accessible technology means for smaller practices, the expo floor and an unexpected Columbus connection, and a Kent State alumni reception. Two building tours anchor the back half: Treehouse, a thoughtful multifamily project, and Snapdragon Stadium, a study in designing tiered experiences. They close on what they're taking home - embracing new tools, educating clients on resilience and long-term value, and the wide-open opportunity facing a profession that needs its next generation to step up.

Charlene Li is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and strategist who has spent decades helping leaders navigate disruptive technology and organizational change. In this episode, the Arcfluence Team sits down with Charlene for a grounded conversation about AI, architecture, and what it takes for firms to adapt with clarity instead of fear.

Charlene frames AI not as a magic solution or a replacement for human expertise, but as a leadership, culture, and decision-making challenge. The conversation explores how architecture and design firms can use AI to reduce friction, improve client communication, rethink workflows, support talent development, and create new value in the earliest stages of a project.

Rather than chasing every new tool, Charlene argues that firms should start with the problems they need to solve, build AI fluency across their teams, and create governance that helps people move faster without losing control. The result is a practical discussion about experimentation, judgment, adaptability, and the human expertise that still sits at the center of good design.