Rachel began her career in Washington, D.C. after earning a three-year master’s at the University of Virginia. In D.C., she worked on diverse project types, including military housing, design guidelines for planned communities in the Middle East, historic private homes, and K-12 schools. She began to focus on municipal projects when she moved to Boston ten years ago. Since then, her work has concentrated on community centers, teen centers, senior centers, libraries, and preschools. She enjoys guiding a project from beginning to end, from feasibility studies, through construction, to post occupancy evaluations.

Throughout her career, she has often worked on structures with historic significance, and finds such renovations especially rewarding because of their transformative nature. She also finds the unique way building types from different eras are constructed fascinating, and enjoys the design challenges existing buildings pose. She gets great satisfaction from working with the public, both guiding users through design and construction and facilitating community outreach and consensus. She enjoys the esoterica of public bidding law and using that knowledge to advocate for the owner during construction.

In the office, she prides herself on her mentoring abilities, working with younger staff and teaching them design and production fundamentals.