About Form Follows Tech
Buildings last decades. The world around them doesn’t.
Form Follows Tech explores how technology and changing human behavior are reshaping the built environment — from the evolution of familiar building types to the emergence of entirely new ones.
Buildings are some of the longest-lived things we create.
Technology, business models, and human behavior can change in a fraction of a building’s lifespan.
That mismatch creates both risk and opportunity.
A building planned around today’s assumptions can become strategically outdated before it reaches the end of its useful life. But the same forces of change can also reveal new possibilities: different ways to work, travel, learn, shop, gather, live, and build.
That is what Form Follows Tech exists to explore.
Thinking about buildings through change
Every building typology is built around assumptions.
How people behave. What they value. Where activities happen. What needs to be physical. How organizations operate. Which technologies exist. What customers, passengers, students, employees, or residents expect.
When those assumptions change, architecture eventually changes with them.
Retail is being reshaped by e-commerce and fulfillment networks. Offices by remote work and AI. Transportation by digital mobility platforms and automation. Schools may be reshaped by personalized learning. Airports increasingly operate through apps, biometrics, data, and interconnected systems.
Sometimes these changes alter an existing typology.
Sometimes they make parts of it unnecessary.
And sometimes they create entirely new building types that did not previously exist.
FFT studies that territory.
What you’ll find here
The core of Form Follows Tech is a series of Typology Strategy Reports exploring how technological and behavioral change could reshape different parts of the built environment.
Around those reports, I publish shorter observations, visual strategies, design fiction, emerging signals, and provocations intended to make possible futures easier to see and discuss.
Some of the work is practical and strategic.
A recurring FFT method is the Assumption Audit, which identifies the assumptions embedded in a building strategy and asks which ones may be most vulnerable to change. I call the resulting exposure typology risk.
That work is particularly relevant when owners, developers, and design teams are making major long-term capital decisions.
But FFT is not only about avoiding the wrong future — it is also about imagining better ones.
The aim is to question inherited models, discover emerging ones, and explore what technology might make possible before architecture catches up.
Why Form Follows Tech
My perspective comes from more than two decades designing airports, some of the most technologically complex buildings in the world.
While working on the new Hamad International Airport in Doha, I had an epiphany: billions of dollars of glass, steel, and concrete could not open until the right software worked.
The digital world was no longer simply supporting the physical one — it was helping determine whether the physical world worked at all.
Since then, I have become increasingly interested in a larger question:
What happens to architecture when the technologies shaping human behavior change faster than architecture itself?
The old maxim says form follows function. But that’s not the whole picture. Function changes when technology changes. Form follows tech.
And that matters because technology is changing faster than we can build.
Who FFT is for
FFT is for people curious about where the built environment is going next.
Owners and developers making long-term decisions.
Architects and planners questioning inherited typologies.
Technology and innovation leaders thinking about the physical consequences of digital change.
And anyone interested in how new ways of living, working, moving, learning, and gathering could eventually produce new forms of architecture.
The goal is not to predict a single future — it is to understand change well enough to see more possibilities.
Better questions. Better decisions. Better futures for the built environment.
Welcome to Form Follows Tech.
