Ian Morgan of Next Architecture on renovating Edmonton’s law courts without closing them, putting AI to work on RFPs, and why a flat, mid-sized firm is a competitive advantage.
Ian trained at the Bartlett and in Cardiff, landed in Edmonton in 2002, and in 2016 co-founded Next Architecture with Alan Partridge, carrying forward a legacy that traces back to 1938. Thirty-four years into his career, he leads a deliberately mid-sized firm that competes with companies ten times its size, and in this conversation he explains exactly how.
We get into the parts of running a firm they don’t teach in architecture school: cash flow, forecasting, the months where payroll keeps you up at night, and the planning tools that turn those months back into sleep. Ian walks through the renovation of the Edmonton law courts, where the building couldn’t close, so his team built the new envelope outside the existing one and worked four storeys above an operating courthouse. We talk about laser scanning heritage buildings, what point-cloud data reveals that the naked eye can’t, how his firm trained AI on twenty years of project sheets to answer RFPs, and where he thinks the technology stops and the architect begins.
We also dig into how he builds his team: a flat structure where the partners sit at the same desks as everyone else, hiring for technical grounding, and why staying mid-sized on purpose is a client-service decision, not a growth failure.
Topics include: firm succession, leading through cyclical markets, budgeting and value engineering with clients, energy performance in Edmonton’s climate, WELL certification, historic preservation, BIM and Revit, AI in architecture, and building a team built to last.
Connect with Ian and Next Architecture: [link]
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