Rachel Minnery, AIA, LEED-AP

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Rachel Minnery, AIA, is a project manager at the Seattle firm Mithūn and cofounder of the Seattle chapter of Architects Without Borders. Minnery also has served as chair of the AIA Seattle Disaster Preparedness and Response Committee and on the national AIA Disaster Assistance Committee. She was recently honored for her community and professional efforts with the 2008 Ball State University G.O.L.D. (Graduate of the Last Decade) Award. Each year, a maximum of eight alumni are honored with the G.O.L.D. award. The award was be presented to Minnery on September 26.

Where did you receive your education?
I spent five years at Ball State University earning a BArch and a B.S. in Environmental Science. I’ve done some continuing education since then but nothing formalized.

Do you have any hobbies?
I certainly do. I love Seattle because of the great outdoors here so I’m a hiker, a biker—that’s also my foremost way to commute. And I run, backpack, do yoga. I love it all.

What are you currently reading?
Too much e-mail; whatever’s on my computer screen. It’s really hard for me to make time to read. Actually some coworkers just recommended a book called Getting Things Done as a way of trying to become more efficient, and so I’ve been reading that. I also look back on Cradle to Cradle as something that to this day still guides me in my ideal.

How did you get involved with disaster preparedness and response efforts?
It dates back to my thesis when I was at Ball State. I had some great opportunities there for traveling, and during my thesis year, I spent a semester in Miami. As an idealist architecture student, when I was looking at my thesis I thought: “I wonder what it would be like if we actually got to start over and how would we look at the vernacular of architecture and building today if we could do it all over again?” I found a desert island and I thought I’d do that for my thesis, but then being exposed to the hazards in Miami with the hurricanes, I realized that’s a reality for some people when destruction happens.

While I was in Miami, I worked with a professor at Florida International University whose main focus was on hazard mitigation. He was an architect and construction manager by training, and I realized how darn easy it is to prevent extensive catastrophic damage. In particular, I visited a hospital that was right on the coast that he was consulting for. Here you had a critical lifeline in the midst of a disaster that goes down because it’s been flooded by a storm surge, so he went back in and retrofitted it to let the storm surge flow through the first floor. He said, “We’ll move the emergency department off that first floor and bring it upstairs, and we’ll have an operational hospital with very minimal investment up front.” Ever since then, I’ve been really affected by the notion that planning appropriately in your designs can essentially serve as vitamins for health in what we do in the architecture profession.

Once I graduated and moved to Seattle, that was right about the time that the hazards here for earthquakes were really coming to light, so I joined AIA Seattle’s Disaster Preparedness and Response Committee and have been involved with or chair of that committee since.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, with the experience and the knowledge that I had doing damage assessments, I felt an obligation to do something. I e-mailed AIA Louisiana and AIA Mississippi. That e-mail got forwarded on, and a couple weeks afterwards, I was in Mississippi working with the state to assist them with damage assessment of their state structures and infrastructure. I think it was primarily the grassroots efforts of architects that gave a heads-up to AIA national that this is something we should pursue as a formalized program, beyond the special architects that had been working in that capacity—Charlie Harper and Terry Brown—for many years prior.

When and why did you cofound the Seattle chapter of Architects Without Borders?
In January 2005, right after the tsunami, we had someone at Mithūn who put out a plea to AIA Seattle that essentially said: “We are so fortunate here in the Northwest. We have great jobs. We have a great life, and there are people across the world who have been devastated. What can we do to help?” At that time I was chair of the Disaster Preparedness and Response Committee. The two of us got together and sent out a meeting request. We had 50 people show up from Seattle who wanted to do something about that, and it just took off. We formalized it as a legitimate chapter with Architects Without Borders, and it’s taken off on a life of its own. We’re not working on the orphanage in Sri Lanka anymore, but we’ve got anywhere from 3 to 10 projects going at a given time, and it’s all due to the passion of the individuals involved in that organization.

How many projects has AWB Seattle completed?
I would probably say about 12, and that’s anything ranging from assisting with a charrette to doing full design work on a project.

What should architects do to help their practices and communities prepare for disasters?
That’s the million dollar question right there. Really. We do so much work in terms of preparing the government and other nonprofit organizations, but what it’s really going to take is the individual preparing him or herself and the business. Again, it’s a lot easier to take vitamins now than to treat your disease later. We used to say everyone should have a three-day minimum supply to take care of yourself. Now it’s 7–10 days. Everyone should have that and the rule of thumb that we like to follow is to change that out when daylight savings time changes. Check your supplies. Check the batteries in your smoke detector and go ahead and check your emergency kit.

I would say the best thing you could do besides having yourself prepared with supplies would be to establish a communication network. The Number One downfall in my experience with Hurricane Katrina was people not knowing who to call. There was a lot of repetition of what people were doing, so there was a severe lack of efficiency. Just having phone numbers in your pocket of critical people whom you need to call would save a lot of heartache in the end. These are really easy things for people to do, but they will go a long way if unfortunately you ever find yourself in that situation.

In terms of my involvement at the national AIA with the disaster assistance program, we are trying to set up a state coordinator program. I believe we have every state but nine now represented with a state coordinator, so the other thing I highly encourage people to do is to take the training offered by the AIA or the Applied Technology Council. This helps architects to have that confidence and knowledge to be able to respond and evaluate structures and know what our worth is. Everyone thinks about the value of health-care professionals responding to disaster, but once you have your food and water, the next item on the task list is shelter. Our local jurisdictions are overwhelmed by the amount of work that they have to do in their communities to evaluate the safety of the built environment, so architects are invaluable in that they have a general knowledge. We are the conductors of our design team, so we have a little bit of knowledge about everything to evaluate the site and structure. My hope is that every architect takes this training and has exposure and an understanding of the value that we can add to our community outside of what we do in our day-to-day jobs.

What are your thoughts on receiving the Graduate of the Last Decade Award from Ball State University?
I was flabbergasted. It was such an honor for me to receive that. It reminded me of the day I received the letter that I was accepted into the College of Architecture and Planning. There was something about my visit to Ball State, an intuition that I knew that that’s where I wanted to go. I had tremendous mentorship at that institution and wonderful opportunities: my exposure to sustainability and the values that I hold dear in my profession and as a human being. To be acknowledged with that award is just tremendous.

What advice would you offer to young architects?
Find at least one role model and mentor. I think mentorship is incredibly important and we’re not formally integrating that into current practice. I had the great fortune of having mentors early in my career, and to this day their words of encouragement and support still run through my head. Having someone who believes in you and recognizes and acknowledges the individual and unique passions you have helps to fuel that further development. Work hard. Be engaged. Find what you love to do and put everything into it.