Built Environment Design

My undergraduate years in Lafayette were about learning to see. The city itself was a teacher — a place with deep Cajun and Creole roots, a Front Porch culture baked into the sidewalks, and a stubborn insistence on community that no amount of highway development had fully managed to erase.

The work in this portfolio traces that wrestling. Historic preservation projects. Explorations of adaptive reuse. Attempts to render people as the point of a space rather than an afterthought in it. And a growing sense that the real design problem was always social before it was spatial.

I graduated with the Design Excellence Award in 2015. What I carried forward was less the award than the question it represented: what does it mean for a space to feel alive?

The thesis started with a simple observation: healthcare environments make people feel worse than they need to. The clinical stripped away everything that helps — texture, memory, natural light, the small signals that tell a body it is somewhere safe and familiar.

Sense of place was the mechanism. A waiting room that feels like somewhere, rather than nowhere, is not just aesthetically nicer. It does measurable therapeutic work. That argument became the publication that came out of this program in 2020.

This thesis won the Edwin T. Steffian Centennial Award for Master's Thesis Excellence from Boston Architectural College.

One of the studios I taught and researched through at BAC took "The Body Keeps the Score" as its organizing text. The question was deceptively direct: if trauma is stored in the body, what does a building that understands that actually look like?

This studio work became the foundation for the Trauma-Informed Design certification I'm completing through TiD Society in May 2026 — and for the way I approach every community space project now.

The dissertation asks what queer bookstores do for transgender people that other spaces don't. Not just symbolically — physically. What is it about the arrangement of a room, the way light falls on a shelf, the smell of old paper and new ink, the sound of a door that doesn't lock, that makes a trans person feel like they can exhale?

The research draws on phenomenological interviews with trans community members, spatial analysis of queer bookstores across Seattle, and frameworks from Black feminist geography, care ethics, and queer theory. It was presented at the University of Washington School of Public Health's Qualitative Works in Progress series in Spring 2025.

Board member since 2023 for the QueerCrip Research Collective at UW — an interdisciplinary group working at the intersection of queer theory, disability studies, and spatial justice. The collective holds that the built environment is not neutral, and that making it more just requires research methods that center the people most harmed by how things are built now.

My role spans grant writing, organizational development, and connecting the collective's research to applied design practice. The academic work and the consulting work feed each other here more than anywhere else.