years, and a relationship built on trust is a must for them to succeed. We also work to maintain a flow of new clients. 3. Projects: To me, clients and projects are two distinct things. Our job is to manage projects for our clients and ensure they are built correctly. How have the awards you’ve won as an architect affected your professional development? I feel like awards are important for a few reasons: • They establish us as good designers and architects, which gives us credibility with clients. • It’s important to have a presence. Awards keep you relevant and in the public eye, especially within the architectural community. • They may attract clients and people looking for work in our office. • Seeing work through other people’s eyes provides helpful feedback that can teach us what does or doesn’t speak to them. How and why did you and Devin O’Neill start O’Neill Rose Architecture? I went to Amherst on a classical piano scholarship, and I also studied ballet. Until that point, art for me had always been playing somebody else’s music. I had never relied on my own creativity before. But I took an improvisational dance class where we would get on the stage to perform, and only then would the teacher give us a prompt. It was terrifying, but it was also so freeing. — continued on page 32 I had a fantastic professor at Yale named Alex Purves. He always used to say the idea is only 1% of the project. The most important thing I learned is how to take an idea floating in your head and translate it into a physical entity. As you become conscious of your process, you can control it and develop projects intentionally instead of by accident. There’s a difference between performing someone else’s work and your own, which is why many people in creative fields, including architecture, want to express their own point of view. Devin and I both had good experiences working in other firms. We worked in places that did good work and had steep learning curves. But we eventually wanted to explore and develop our own ideas. 31
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