Donna Sink is a practicing architect at Rowland Design based in Indianapolis. Until her recent move there, she was a small firm architect who owned her own practice. She was recently the campus architect at Indianapolis Museum of Art and she’s involve din the local arts and design community as past President and current member of the Indiana chapter of AIA, a board member at People for Urban Progress and a member of the Indianapolis Sign Ordinance Revision Task Force. You may know Donna best from her active Twitter presence or from her work as cohost at Archinect podcast.
This week at EntreArchitect podcast, People for Urban Progress with Donna Sink.
Donna’s Origin Story
Donna’s journey in architecture started when she set up her Barbie’s condo in a bookshelf as a young girl. Her parents recognized her interest and encouraged her to take drafting classes in high school. For her, art felt too personal as an awkward teenager, but she loved drafting. It led her to a visit with her sister in college in Arizona, and when she walked into the lobby of the architecture school, she knew she was hooked.
She did a five year bachelor of architecture at University of Arizona before going to Michigan for grad school. She was a fan of John Irving and loved the stories about him spending time in Vienna, Austria. Michigan had an exchange program that went to Vienna, and she spent a semester there. She realized she had a bachelor of architecture that she could get licensed with and she wanted to spend her two years in grad school doing crazy, more philosophical and theological discoveries at Cranbrook.
Her five year degree prepared her practically to put together a set of documents and function in an office. In grad school at Cranbrook, she wanted to explore more theory and round out her philosophical attitudes. She was entirely responsible for doing the creative work that she wanted to do.
She was 100% immersed in the program. The studio had a kitchen and a huge table where they would make group dinners. When you work in the saarinen design studio and walk home to your dorm through the most beautiful outdoors environment. Everything else felt bland.
Donna met her husband at Cranbrook and they left together to go to Philadelphia where she went straight into an internship at Atkin Olshin Shade. She was there for 10 years and received a ton of help to grow. After she had a baby, her best friend called from Indianapolis and asked her to come on as a partner for high end residential remodels.
When 2008 happened, Donna panicked after seeing the repercussions around the country. She got a call from Ball State University to be an adjunct professor for a guaranteed paycheck, and put the partnership on hold. Donna was now facing these college students knowing that they weren’t going to get a job when they got out of school. She began teaching them how to be entrepreneurs to use their skills in other ways.
She got involved with AIA National’s emerging professional’s group and started pressing the idea of teaching students how to be business people. She put together a local conference talk about how to go about nontraditional practices and has rolled with it ever since. How do we practice in the world where we know each other through Twitter? She got an opportunity to go to the University of Indianapolis as the campus architect and loved it, but missed practicing. She realized that architecture is a long profession and that there was time to wear different hats and do different things.
While pursing different things, she...