Laurie Fisher

If you've been to a rebuild fair lately, you know the feeling. Table after table of builders, each one telling you they're different, their homes are safer, their price is fair. Everyone has a brochure. Everyone has a pitch. And you walk away with a stack of cards and no idea who to believe. We've been thinking about that problem for a while. And we decided the most useful thing we could do for fire survivors, for anyone rebuilding in California, wasn't another brochure. It was a better set...

An introduction from Laurie Fisher, Architect, Founder & CEO Street view of The Esther - one of our new PHNX Portfolio Homes™ Collection designs I founded PHNX after the 2017 Tubbs Fire, having spent two years working with five Santa Rosa families through their rebuilds. I realized quickly why mass-market builders weren’t there rebuilding alongside them. Every fire-loss property is different, different slopes, soils, setbacks, orientations, and that variability makes their model unworkable....

As Women in Construction Week wraps up this Saturday, I've been thinking about what it means to me. I could talk about the numbers (they are bad; women are roughly 14% of the construction workforce, and a fraction of that in the trades and leadership roles), but I'd rather talk about why that gap is so detrimental to an industry that desperately needs new thinking. Here's what I know after 25 years in architecture and development: innovation doesn't happen where everyone is comfortable. It...