Age: 27
On my current job:
Since June, I’ve been working on designing a campus for a global financial services firm in India. It’s all I work on. Down the road, one of the reasons I’m in New York is my appreciation for the extreme challenges of building in the city. In architecture school at Michigan, it was exciting to be in Detroit for the opposite reasons—the ease with which design students can make an impact. In my last semester, I worked on my own design/build project, a small infill façade on a former auto repair shop in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood.
My goals in 10 years:
I plan on getting licensed and continuing to design at a traditional firm. I like where I am, and there’s potential to grow here. Like most young architects, I’ve imagined a private practice, but I don’t hang on to visions of a firm with just my name on the door. I don’t think that’s the future of the industry. Architecture is becoming increasingly collaborative across disciplines, and as projects become more complex and as daily working platforms—Revit, BIM, and others—promote intense collaboration across disciplines, I think the idea of the sole designer, the mastermind, is less and less a part of my generation’s ethos.
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