Throughout the year, Studio G will publish profiles of our staff members to showcase our collaborative team. The following blog post is the fourth in this series.
Neither Shaun Lynch nor Athena Hay specifically set out for a career in architecture, but that’s where they both ended up. Shaun, a senior project architect, and Athena, a designer, both work in Studio G’s education/institutional studio and contribute to multiple projects.
Shaun was interested in architecture from an early age but attended art school and worked in carpentry before settling on architecture.
“As a kid, I was always looking up buildings in encyclopedias and building them with blocks,” he said. “My father was disappointed when I went to art school instead of architecture school.”
During his time in carpentry, Shaun often worked with architects and eventually built a cabin on a peninsula in Ontario from his design.
Athena, too, went to art school, but had a “lingering interest in architecture,” she said. As a child, she enjoyed computer games like the Sims where she could create her own structure. Athena studied ceramics in college but found that architecture combines her love of problem-solving, art, and history.
Role at Studio G
At Studio G, Shaun does a lot of detail work on projects, and he’s currently working on the African Community Education (ACE) project in Worcester—a “renovation of three adjoining buildings with a major addition in the middle,” he said.
As a designer, Athena works on “different phases of projects, from proposals to assisting on [construction documents],” she said. She’s currently working on a couple of proposals and the new Florence Roche Elementary School in Groton.
“At a smaller firm like this,” Athena said, there is a “wide range of responsibilities” for someone at her level.
Shaun said he admires Athena’s attention to detail and ability to follow directions and take them one step further. “Gail’s really good at getting really brilliant people,” he added, saying that Athena has a “great personality and fun to be around…”
“Shaun has a cadence to him that’s immediately so calming,” Athena said. “I like that he marches to the beat of his own drum but is still very queued into the things that matter.”
Mentorship at Studio G
“There’s a lot of mentorship regardless of who you’re assigned to,” Athena said. She said she’s learned a lot about detailing with Shaun while working on The Residences at Lawrence Hill in Wellfleet. But the mentorship does not stop at work advice.
“Keihily [Moore] has taught me a lot about bikes,” Athena added.
Shaun said that mentorship is “really important.” As a professor at Boston Architectural College, he said he sees the value of having mentors.
“I love the genuine commitment that there is to social equity and sustainability [at Studio G],” Athena said. “Gail’s a force to be reckoned with and means what she says.”
Shaun added, “it is a firm with definite values,” and those values come from the top and start with Gail.
Pride in Their Work
At her previous job, Athena worked on a private home in Jamaica Plain. Recently, “I was walking, and they shouted my name.” The homeowners told her that their kitchen was finally complete and invited her in to see the finished product. She said it was “the best day ever” to see this family loving their new space so much, and said it came out just as she envisioned it on paper.
Shaun said that he’s proud of a “sunroom for an old historical house in Belmont.” He said it was challenging to add a sunroom to this house while making it fit within the historical context.
“If you go into the house now, you would never even know,” he said. He, too, enjoyed visiting the space one the room was complete and seeing the occupants using the space and being so happy with it. “The client was a really good client,” he said. “She knew what was right.”
Dream Projects
Athena said that her dream project is “any project that needs work,” but has a “strong affinity for summer camps,” as she attended as a kid, and they hold a special place in her heart.
“Like education, there’s a lot of room for creativity,” she said. “They are so needed. It’s an opportunity for any and all kids to engage without phones and be in our New England landscape…I obsessively look at camps [and think] ‘That could be better. What if we change this, what if we added that?’”
Shaun said that he’d love to do another project on an isolated island, like the cabin he built for himself.
“Minimal housing is really interesting to me,” he said. “Concrete, exposed steel, that kind of construction—that interests me.” He said that the irony of minimalistic architecture is that it’s often more difficult to do. For example, he said that a “minimalistic” window is harder to create than a standard one. But he said it is “so beautiful and so attractive,” and he’d love to work on that sort of project.
