235: 'How Olson Kundig Scaled AI Adoption Across a 300-Person Firm', with Marlene Chen and Blair Payson
A conversation with Marlene Chen and Blair Payson about scaling AI adoption across a 300-person architecture firm by prioritizing culture, office-wide critiques, democratizing visualization, and managing change and software licensing.
Marlene Chen and Blair Payson of Olson Kundig 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 practice.
This episode is especially relevant for firm leaders, design technologists, and anyone responsible for getting a growing practice to adopt new tools without flattening its culture. If you've ever wondered how a studio this size balances experimentation against deadlines, and why the people always matter more than the technology, this one will give you plenty to sit with.
Original episode page: https://trxl.co/235
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Episode Links:
Connect with the Guests
- Marlene Chen — Principal | Owner, COO, Olson Kundig
- Blair Payson — Principal | Owner, Olson Kundig
- Olson Kundig
Projects Mentioned
- The Space Needle — Century Project — Olson Kundig's renovation added the first revolving glass floor in the world; Alan Maskin led design and Blair Payson was project architect. New double-stack, fully glazed elevators are part of the ongoing work. Space Needle
- Chicken Point Cabin — The kinetic window wall that flips open with a hand crank, easy enough that a child in a cast can operate it. The origin story for Olson Kundig's body of kinetic work.
- Moonlight Basin — Large-scale hospitality project in Montana with a lodge, spa, and branded residences. Marlene cites it as an early foray into hospitality at scale, and the firm's first ski lift.
- Gates Foundation Visitor Center — Cultural project both guests worked on; a touchpoint for the firm's exhibit and institutional design.
People Mentioned
- Tom Kundig — Design principal whose kinetic residential work defined much of the firm's public identity.
- Jim Olson — Founder, still practicing; his six decades of residential work remain a source of inspiration inside the office.
- Alan Maskin — Design lead on the Space Needle Century Project.
- Kevin Kudo-King — Co-led the firm's hospitality project in Austin with Tom Kundig.
- Phil Turner — The firm's "gizmologist," the mechanical brain behind the kinetic elements.
- Greg Rogers — Director of visualization; built an in-house aggregator of graphic tools and helped scale visualization from a team of three to effectively the whole office.
- Gavin Argo — Design technology strategist at Olson Kundig, described as "fishing in everything."
- Chris Parsons — Founder of Knowledge Architecture; Olson Kundig is a longtime customer of its intranet platform.
Knowledge Management & Firm Culture
- Knowledge Architecture — The intranet and knowledge-management platform Olson Kundig has used for years to help experts share what they know across offices. Website
Tools & Software Mentioned
- Enscape — Cited as an earlier step in the democratization of visualization, making good-enough rendering accessible to non-specialists. Website
- Rhino — Subject of internal design competitions used to get the office experimenting with tools. Website
- Revit — The BIM platform behind the "painful upgrade" change-management story. Website
- Weavy — The AI video/creative tool behind the surprise surge in office software expenses after one compelling proposal video made the rounds. weavy.ai
- Nano Banana — Google's Gemini image-generation model, referenced as one of the leaps that prompted the visualization team to rethink its role. Website
About Marlene Chen:
Marlene Chen is a principal, owner, and chief operating officer at Olson Kundig, the Seattle-based architecture and design firm of roughly 300 people. She joined in 2005 and spent close to two decades on cultural and institutional work, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to projects for Tillamook and Microsoft, in both design and project management roles. Today she steers the firm's governance and operations, which puts her at the center of the least glamorous and most important question in any growing practice: how do you get hundreds of people across three offices to share what they know and adopt new tools without losing the culture that made the work good in the first place. That operational lens is exactly why her read on AI adoption is worth hearing.
About Blair Payson:
Blair Payson, AIA, LEED AP, is a principal and owner at Olson Kundig who has been with the firm since 2004. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University and built his reputation on projects like the Century Project for the Space Needle, where he served as project architect, and the Gates Foundation Visitor Center. A maker who revels in the details, he describes himself as a practitioner rather than a technologist, and he has grown organically into the role of shepherding the firm's conversation around research, experimentation, and AI. His current work spans a new art park at the Crocker Art Museum and museum projects further afield, which keeps him close to both the craft and the tools reshaping it.
