During my formative years whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I said, a veterinarian. The idea that one could have a profession catering to animals both exhilarated and relieved me. As an extremely shy and introverted kid, my communication challenges with people limited my trusted friend circle to dogs and an occasional guest-starring horse or bird.
By the time I turned ten I realized that veterinarians did not spend their days soothing animals but rather performing gruesome tasks like pulling random items from dog bodies that had no business embedded in dog bodies, resetting bones, and end-of-life activities. Had dog psychology been a reputable profession back then surely I would have traveled that path.
Thus discouraged by the idea of managing the physical suffering of four-legged friends, I turned my sights to the built environment and decided that I would join the ranks of practicing architects. My memory cannot produce any logical person or experience that would have precipitated such an imaginative leap. To pivot from animals to buildings, even today, makes less sense than where I’ve ended up. But pivot I did, which meant I took shop and oil painting classes in middle school and advanced mathematics in high school.
I applied for a liberal arts program instead of a professional architecture program, perhaps understanding the need to diversify my educational experience. Barnard College offered everything I wanted in a school: small classes, single sex, liberal arts architecture major, and New York City. Whole years of my life had been spent watching movies set in New York City and dreaming of the day I would get to live there and study architecture.
And study I did! I entered the class of 1997 declaring architecture as my major and set to work devouring any reading material I could put my hands on in addition to the vast requirements of my major. I stalked the halls of Lehman Library and the stacks at Columbia stuffing everything that looked new and interesting into my bag and scurrying back to my dorm room. I rollerbladed down to the Brooklyn Bridge and up to the Bronx. I rowed the Harlem River with my crew team and rode my bike across the George Washington Bridge, up the Palisades and back exploring and experiencing the city and its connective roads with the hunger of a thousand lions eating vast amounts of pasta and pizza upon return. I watched people and movies and listened to live music and conversations and reveled in all the different ways life could unfold. I wrote and moved and wrote and moved until one day it all became noise and I yearned for stillness, a more peaceful place.
At that point I arrived in Atlanta to study at Spelman as an exchange student for a semester at the urging of my aunt who was then vice president of student affairs. Spelman allowed me the space to let my mind settle. To be quieter and think about the ways in which my architecture major failed to integrate the world I experienced on the street [that involved actual people] with the staid ideals of the profession. I realized that film offered a wider format by which to dream a new world into reality. What became clear was that architecture and film occupy two sides of the same coin: two-dimensional versus three-dimensional reality. The story mind and the story landscape.
Once that connection formed for me, there was no turning back. After graduating with my architecture degree I enrolled in film school. Editing called to me. The person who puts it all together. The person who looks at all the puzzle pieces and says, I’ll show you the way through this story. In addition to working retail (very poorly I might add) I took on video editing projects and spent my summers as a wedding videographer only to later end up working as a post-production producer at an advertising firm. Not exactly the route I intended but, hey, I rolled with it.
Two decades later and three years into a property development project in downtown Atlanta I’m only now realizing that my work continues to exist where film and architecture converge. Looking at the construction that is about to wrap up and moving on to the tenant curation that must follow, I can see now that my vision and my choices edit the landscape for thousands of lives that live and pass through here daily. Property development decisions about how the building is accessed, what it looks like, and who gets to build their businesses here, these are all editing decisions.
I’ll show you the way through this story, this neighborhood, this community, this downtown life. I’ll show you what a healthy landscape looks like. I’ll show you how to feel proud about where you are and be inspired about where you’re going. I’ll show you that art and business and diversity can coexist and thrive. I’ll show you what it looks like to believe in a vision for a better community by transforming the one we live in without writing the original characters out of the story. I’ll show you that this happens not because of me alone but because of the many other people and businesses who believe in this place and continue to hold our connections in place to make it real.
I still hang with the animals every chance I get. There isn’t a dog within eyesight that I have not tried to talk to or hug on the street. But I know my purpose is bigger here. I know my talent lay in being able to see the larger story and execute (however slowly) the steps that lead to a different reality. I’ve done it with my own body and because of this I know I can do it in the field. A field where humans and animals alike can benefit from an enhanced landscape filled with purpose.
