Every morning in DC is a lesson. I don’t mean the kind you read in textbooks—I mean the kind you catch in passing glances, worn stoops, and bus stop conversations. You notice how morning light hits a rowhouse window just right and wonder who designed that detail. You wonder why one alley feels warm and another feels like retreat. You begin collecting moments that influence how you sketch, how you build.
Working at KGD has taught me that architecture doesn’t begin with the blueprint—it begins with noticing. One Tuesday afternoon, I found myself walking from a site meeting through a neighborhood I’d never wandered before. The contrast was jarring: brutalist offices next to vibrant mural-covered cafes. I started asking different questions. How do we design transitions? What does harmony sound like in materials?
DC isn’t shy—it’s layered, political, poetic. I’ve learned to listen to the tension. In designing a civic space last spring, I borrowed from the way Dupont Circle handles chaos—with curves, flow, and pause. That project challenged me to work outside of symmetry, to let form follow emotion for once.
In the studio, I hold onto those fragments. A conversation about public seating at a bus shelter led me to rethink pedestrian experience on a project I was managing. The client appreciated the care, though they didn’t know where the idea came from. I didn’t tell them it started with a woman sitting cross-legged on the edge of a planter, eating a sandwich and smiling at strangers.
That’s architecture. It’s quiet. It’s observation. It’s giving shape to kindness, or confrontation, or memory. And DC keeps me honest.
