My Greatest Source of Motivation: “If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life.” My father, who passed away 10 years ago, gave me this advice. As a teenager, he immigrated to the United States from Portugal in pursuit of the very freedoms which today I seek to express through my architecture.
My Greatest Accomplishment: It has been an honor and privilege to be part of the design leadership for SOM’s work with the U.S. State Department. At its core, an embassy represents the American ideals of democracy to its host nation, using design as the vehicle to invite peaceful dialogue and build common ground. By synthesizing vernacular design with American innovations, the resulting architecture enables diplomacy based on mutual respect. It is my long-held belief that architecture is a gateway to express the ideals of the institution it represents. This was the foundation of my architectural thesis dissertation at Drexel (which received the Michael Pearson Prize Gold Metal), and it has been an incredible opportunity to bring my thoughts into reality.
How Drexel Helped Me: Architecture’s 2+4 co-op experience allowed for four years of on-the-job learning, enriching academic discussions by providing an opportunity to immediately apply these principles to real-world problems. This accelerated learning vaulted my career with prompts orchestrated by professors who were themselves thought leaders in the industry and who shared their commitment to excellence with their students. In that spirit, I embrace that approach both as a practitioner and as a professor at Drexel (2009–2013) and at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where I have been teaching since 2014.
Where I Hope to Be in Five Years: I am committed to leading my firm’s initiative for closing the “carbon loop,” where almost all near-term carbon gets reused within design. Building upon a two-year firmwide effort that I facilitated, the carbon loop will apply this research to de-carbonize and de-chemicalize our designs, thereby rapidly reducing our carbon usage in the built environment. Through this work and those of countless others around the world, global temperature remains below +1.5 degrees from pre-industrial levels. Achieving this requires that I foster a team mindset that emphasizes passive design strategies that embrace vernacular architecture, which is advanced through optimizing active systems that respond to local climate conditions, and is offset with renewable, clean energy sources.
If My Life Were a Music Video, the Song Would Be: “Vídeo Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. MTV chose this song to be the first-ever music video it aired in an ironic nod to its own revolutionary impact on the music industry. For me, great design transcends time while it also transforms through innovation. One evening not long ago, I was sitting in Nesbitt learning about the curtainwall and structural design of Lever House (designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1952), marveling at how its innovations transformed the design of urban towers around the world. Now some 20 years later, I am a principal at the very same firm, recognized as a thought leader implementing strategies to reduce embodied and operational carbon creating the same lasting impact on building design.