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In the latest episode of From the Ground Up, Motif CEO Amar Hanspal sat down with Stuart Jon Traynor, Creative Director, and Lindsay Griffith, Architectural Associate at PHX Architecture.
PHX Architecture is a Scottsdale and Beverly Hills studio known for high-end custom residential and hospitality work, and over the past several months it has become one of the more thoughtful firms we've watched put AI to work in day-to-day practice.
The conversation started where a lot of firms are starting right now: with clients. Stuart described a shift that arrived fast, inside six to eight months. Clients began showing up with AI-rendered images of their own, asking whether PHX could build something like them. They had to make a deliberate decision about how AI would be used, rather than letting it happen to them. What followed was a working philosophy for how architects use AI for rendering without letting it flatten the craft.
TLDR: PHX treats AI like a gifted but inexperienced new hire. It moves fast and takes on the heavy lifting, but it needs direction, it gets checked, and it never does the actual designing.
Treat AI like your most talented, least experienced team member
Most of the session kept circling one question: what role AI actually serves on the team. PHX doesn't treat it as a shortcut or a threat. They treat it as a colleague with real range and no real experience.
"We see AI as a team member," Stuart said. "It's a very talented team member, but it's the most inexperienced team member." It has read about buildings but never stood in one. "It's never walked through a building. It doesn't understand how light really fills and plays and comes into a space. It's never touched or smelled materials."
So PHX manages it the way any good studio manages a promising junior. "Just as you would mentor any junior member of staff, and check and analyze their work, that's how we approach AI," Stuart said. Every output gets reviewed by someone who knows what a building should be before it goes anywhere near a client.
That framing works for any firm bringing AI into design. Set the expectation for what comes out, keep a senior eye on it, and leave the actual judgment with the people who trained for it.
Resist the pull toward photorealism too early
PHX has a distinctive house style for early concepts, and there's real logic to it. Instead of pushing straight to a polished image, the studio blends sketch and realism on purpose.
"We like to show a little bit of realism, but not complete realism," Lindsay explained. "We've created this concept of a sketch mixed with photorealism, so the client knows it's still a concept, but here's what it could feel like in the real environment."
That restraint takes discipline, because a photorealistic image is the easy thing to make. "It's so easy to get a photorealistic image from day one," she said. "But the danger is, when you're still understanding the space, the volumes, the forms, how the light plays on it, going right to the end is dangerous." A too-finished image asks the client to sign off on a decision the team hasn't actually made yet.
Leaving the concept visibly unfinished keeps the conversation where it should be. "It really helps our clients stay in that concept mindset," Lindsay said. "Things are changing, we're trying different things, rather than getting too hung up on a perfect photorealistic rendering." (We've written more about why early-stage renders should signal "all doors are open" in this piece on architectural visualization.)
Let speed make the thinking richer, not the design automatic
Everyone talks about AI saving time. PHX was clearer about what the saved time is for. Getting to a concept image used to mean hunting down reference photos, collaging them, building a quick model, and applying textures. AI can help do that work in minutes but the real value is more than time savings. It frees up the team to experiment and concept far more.
"It enables us to test and try different things in design and really push the boundaries," Stuart said. He was careful about where the credit goes: "Our designs become richer through the power of AI, not necessarily that AI is doing any of the designing at all. It just takes a lot of the heavy lifting and speeds the process up."
The speed doesn't make the design for you. It buys room to try more ideas, tell a sharper story about a concept, and land on something better because more options actually got looked at. The designing still belongs to the designers.
Teach AI your firm's language so the work stays yours
The thornier problem PHX raised was identity. Now that anyone can generate an architectural image, a generic one doesn't count for much. The studio's real challenge was making the output unmistakably its own.
"Our challenge was: how do we use AI and still brand ourselves?" Stuart said. "How do we make it unique to us?" Their answer is to hold on to what works. The prompts, presets, and reference images behind a PHX-looking result stay on the board for the whole studio to learn from. "The prompts are very important to us," Stuart said. "We love that we can have those recorded, and other studio members can go into the boards and see how we got to an image." A look that took real effort to develop becomes something the studio can reuse, instead of one person's trick.
Stuart kept coming back to a bigger point about the profession. Architects, he said, have to decide for themselves how AI gets used in their studios, both to move the work forward and to "safeguard the profession from the misuse of AI."
Some of that is trust. At Motif, your designs stay yours. Neither Motif nor our third-party AI providers will use your work to train or fine-tune AI models. For a studio whose reputation rides on every image it sends out, having that in writing counts.
Where that leaves the toolset
The same pattern ran through the whole conversation: AI sticks when it fits the way designers already work. For Stuart, that shows up in what he reaches for now. "It's drawing board and Motif." Sketches, references, model views, renders, and even day-to-night video sit on one board the studio opens together, which he said makes it much easier to keep collaborators in sync across two offices.
That is what Motif is built to do. Start from a sketch, an image, or a live view of a Revit or Rhino model, generate architecture-specific renders in a click, steer them with reference images and targeted edits, and turn a still into video when a concept needs to move. You can sketch right on the board now, with a pen or an iPad, so the hand drawing every architect starts with sits next to the model and the renders instead of in a separate pile.
From the Ground Up is Motif's webinar series exploring how technology is reshaping AEC practice. Watch the full PHX Architecture episode on YouTube, or explore Motif's AI visualization capabilities.
