What if the practice were designed as carefully as the work?

In 2025 I served as the 101st President of the American Institute of Architects, leading the profession's largest organization as AI began reshaping how firms work.

My path did not run in a straight line. I started in traditional practice doing site adaptations for Home Depot, work that never felt like enough, so I moved to a firm designing K-12 and community buildings and ended up running much of its pro bono practice. That led me to Public Architecture, where I became program manager of the 1+ program, which asked firms to pledge one percent of their billable hours to the public good. Convincing architects to give the time was the easy part. The harder part was finding nonprofits who understood that an architect delivers far more than a new building. It was my first real look at how narrowly our value gets defined, sometimes by us.

After an MBA and an MPA I went looking for a design strategy practice working on both sides of where traditional practice starts and stops, and found it at MKThink. By then I had been around the AIA long enough to hear the same conversation come around again and again: everything the profession has given away, all the seats we no longer hold. What I rarely heard was the next sentence. We would say we need a seat at the table and then never ask how we actually earn one. Chasing that how is what took me into tech, onto the real estate team at Slack and then Salesforce, and eventually into people and operations. That is where I started treating a business the way I had been trained to treat a building: as something you design.

I started Practice of Architecture in business school, at first just a collection of the articles I thought architects should be reading, most of them about business. Turning it into what it is now took its own set of pivots. Each move had looked, for a while, like a step away from architecture. What took me years to see is that the business of a practice is a design problem too, one most of us were never trained to solve. That conviction sits under everything I do now: the profession does not need to optimize the model it inherited, it needs to transform it, and transformation is a design problem we are built to take on.

That mix of design training and business training shows up in how I talk about firms: metrics alongside purpose, business rigor alongside human empathy. I speak internationally on transforming how the profession works, AI in the built environment, and the widening definition of what it means to practice architecture. I sit on the boards of Shepley Bulfinch and Luckett & Farley and advise Acelab, which keeps me close to how firms are run and where the tools are heading. I'm also a mother, a strength-training regular, and a believer that the business should support the life you want.

Boards and advisory