This is my last week as an architect.

As a child, I knew I wanted to be an architect. Instead of Barbies, I played with blocks. Instead of playing tea party, I designed the houses the tea party attendees would live in. My mom loves to say (even to this day!) that I was the only child she knew who could name a city just by it’s skyline.

In highschool, I took the drafting classes. I learned how to draw imaginary blocks in 3D on the computer. I drew floorplans to houses I pulled out of my head on a whim. I applied to colleges for architecture.

In college, I enjoyed it. Finally, learning architecture on the big… real world scale in New York City! I dreamed of going to work in the pencil skirts, my hair pulled up in a french twist, coffee in one hand… rolled up drawings in the other. I dreamed of taking all that I had learned… architecture history, theory, city skylines… all of it, and create the perfect architecture.

By about my third year of college, I discovered… architecture wasn’t what I thought it was afterall. Unless you have the perfect architecture (doesn’t exist), or the perfect client (doesn’t exist) or the perfect unlimited budget (definitely doesn’t exist)… you would be constricted and restricted. I realized that hand and pencil drawings were in a slow death. I felt the first trappings of creativity.

In my fourth year of college… I was in Rome, Italy… I decided to ignore that gut feeling. I was studying architecture… in ROME! I discovered the root of all architecture. I was living in it’s birthplace, and every crack and crevasse whispered to me… if you fall in love with me, you will love architecture again…

After college, there was the real world. Pencil skirt, yes. Coffee in one hand… YES… sometimes in both. Rolled up drawings? No. It’s all in the computer. It could be glamorous at times. I worked on large projects, had very well known clients, worked with esteemed colleagues… the best of the best!

… but that nagging feeling was always there. I missed the hand drawings, I missed the pure opportunities for creation… where I would conceive something… anything… and on my own accord, I could expel that thought out into the world in any outlet or media possible. Over time, it became more and more evident in my everyday life… that I was not going to be happy until I could have that environment again. The environment, to create! To BE.

That moment to BE is here, well almost… thus ends my career as an architect. Time to witness the re-birth! … and I am all smiles. :)

Today is the day that I will finish the office renovation! Last coat of paint is drying, boxes are ready to be unpacked… and the shop will re-open on Friday, January 28th!

It’s the first skyline I’ve drawn in a while… a rolling Italian country hillside, complete with a field of poppies, Italian Cypress trees, and a winding path leading to a hilltop Italian village. Take me there…

The new online portfolio has launched! It took me six days of intense coding, and there are a few things I still need to work out, but for the most part, this is it!

The very first online portfolio website I built took many, many weeks… probably months actually! It was a combination of learning the language of HTML, and trying to decide how I could get it to look like the website I had in mind. The second time I re-built it, it took less time… but was mainly just a change of colors… nothing too dramatic so to speak. The third time I re-designed it, took many weeks again and it was completely different than the way the first two had looked. I was proud of it!

I was happy with it until about a week ago… when I decided that it was time to re-launch Architette Studios version 4.0! This time, I had to learn the language of javascripting, css, jQuery and brush up on the ‘ol HTML… so I have no idea how I was able to do it, but in about 5 days, I re-built my portfolio, and it’s just a little over 24 hours from now when I will be re-launching it for you all! Now this design and layout takes the prize!

I played with the idea of buying an website template and just plugging my work into it, I thought about hiring someone to do it for me… but when it comes down to it, I just love knowing that I created it…

I hope you will all enjoy!