ATLANTA – (Authority Magazine) Patrick Chopson, AIA, is Co-Founder and Principal of cove, an AI-powered architecture firm transforming how buildings are designed and delivered. A licensed architect with 20+ years of experience, technologist and building scientist, Patrick focuses on the intersection of AI and architecture. He previously co-founded the building performance consultancy Pattern r+d and co-authored Build Like It’s the End of the World (Wiley, 2025), a guide to decarbonizing the built environment. His work has been featured in Architect Magazine, TechCrunch, and ArchDaily, and he regularly collaborates with developers and industry leaders on next-generation solutions.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we begin, can you please introduce yourself? Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I trained as both an architect and a mechanical engineer, which sounds like I didn’t know what I wanted to do. The truth is the opposite. I’ve always been riding the line between art and science, and buildings are the one place where those two things are forced to live together.
There’s an old saying in my industry: architects know nothing about everything, and engineers know everything about nothing. It’s unfair to both sides, but it captures something real. Architecture trains you to ask about people and place: who uses this, what do they need, what should it feel like on a Tuesday morning. Engineering trains you to ask why before how: you don’t move to the next step until you understand the cause behind the one you’re on. I wanted both questions running in the same brain, and for a long time that made me hard to categorize.
What fascinated me most were the breakdowns: the moments when the normal way of working stops working. Most people treat a breakdown as a failure to be patched. I learned to treat it as an X-ray, because it’s the only time you can actually see how the work happens. Who really made the decision. What information they actually had. Where the understanding fell out of the process. Study enough breakdowns and you stop trying to fix people and start redesigning the way they work.
That’s what eventually led me to co-found cove, an architecture firm built around AI. Not AI as a product we sell, but as the connective tissue inside our own practice, so that the artistic questions and the scientific answers finally move at the same speed.