Many architects will certainly consider the choices I’ve made throughout this digital space to be in poor taste: this virtual archive serves as the web presence I put forth when seeking to progress my career as well as a personal portfolio where I exhibit the fruits of my labour (all of them labours of love) in every arena of my life. This biography will be no exception; I invite you to come to know me better regardless of how our paths cross.
With that, I would like to introduce myself: on Turtle Island I am called Catherine, in Greece it is Πιπίνα, some comrades call me ICE, and to my family, it’s Peeps.
From my earliest memory, I felt more grounded in space and body than word and thought; despite this I speak and write more and better than I draw and move.
On paper, this is not an ideal skill set for a self-proclaimed designer of any kind.
Of that, I have always been made very aware.
The path that has brought me to the body of work I claim to date has been a winding one, fraught with a lot of exceptional failures and a few notable successes interspersed.
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My first great love was music, and from a very tiny age through the near-end of my teenage years, I upheld the motivation that I’d pursue it as a career, armed with the knowledge that I was terrible in musicality, lacking innate talent, anything approaching pitch recognition, and acceptable fine motor skills. I played the piano for thirteen years, marimba for four, drums for two, and guitar for all of one excruciating lesson – today I proudly play zero instruments (yes, even after all those years I wasn’t very good) – but you’ll never find me without something playing on repeat. All of the listening I’ve done over the years has found its way into everything I do. I remember being maybe ten or twelve, and thinking that the city looks as different from the country as it sounds, and wondering which difference was more powerful. I’d find myself at odds with parents, roommates, and cab drivers who certainly did not harbor the same love for the sounds of life as I did… or maybe they simply loved keeping in the heat in the dead of midwestern winter more. Clearly, I didn’t end up the fabulous record executive I’d expected I’d become (nor the piano bar proprietress, globally-touring rockstar… you get the idea), but I’ve found an equal if not greater fulfillment in curating playlists and crafting Garageband tunes.
Before my music “career” could hope to take off, I had already found my second great love: learning. This devotion was never exclusive to the classroom (after all, I had been potty trained with a world map shower curtain), but one that played out before me daily wherever I went. Bilingual since birth, I was exposed to a linguistic cornucopia at home; from all four grandparents’s villager dialects, speckled with remnants of Turkish, to my father’s expatriate, well-read Demotic Greek. In English, I saw my mother’s… colorful South Side Chicago vocabulary alongside my aunt’s sharp, professorial speaking style. Francophone cousins would appear at Christmas, and in the summer, we all made our way to the humid apartments called home dotted across mainland Greece. I attended a couple of years of Greek school amongst the few remaining Hellenic families in my region, but for a reason I still cannot name (and marvel at, myself, to this day), was a sponge for my native tongue that none of my peers seemed to replicate. By age twelve, all the praise I had received for my Greek growing up caught up to me (an uncle still recalls with wonder the story of a tiny child translating a dubbed episode of Spongebob Squarepants to her baby brother, perfectly and in real time); I began writing winning essays for local letters competitions, and two years later, tested for a proficiency certificate so I could teach my language in the community.
My love for English grew at the same rate. At some point around after a decade of scouring every book I could get my hands on, I found myself experimenting with putting my own words on the page, circa age fifteen. I had been heavily praised for my skill in producing essays in the classroom setting, tested well in reading/writing/comprehension, and held the title of Spelling Bee champion in my district since age eight. These traits set me on the fast track to one of the greatest inefficiencies of American public education: the Merit program (otherwise known as Gifted & Talented, High Ability, or by a number of other grave misnomers). Few spaces in my life performed an assault on my passions like this one did. Although this path led me to a life where I all but eradicated reading in my coming of age years, the hidden gems were yet to be discovered. Unbeknownst to me, I was to find two major role models in my final years in the public education system. Eleventh and twelfth grade advanced Language Arts programs were the spaces where I finally came into my own, stylistically and motivationally, in my writing. Those instructors were the first who gave all of the praise I had received real, tangible meaning: in those rooms, I learned that my word, written and spoken, has power.
At seventeen, I received the encouragement to write critically in a space where I had access to structured feedback and reflection, on topics like masculinity, poverty, American education, and other themes near and dear to my heart. I learned, through doing, what I wanted to write about. At eighteen, I stepped into a room of less than twenty exceptional students and learned how to do it, and this time in style. The mysterious cynicism of the program instructor drew me in, and pushed me to produce what I still consider to be some of the best compositions I’ve ever written. What forever stuck was the approach: a provocative attempt to flip everything we knew on its head, from lessons on concision (complex prompts that could have produced master’s theses were to be answered in a single page) to their very antithesis (hours spent extracting every ounce of meaning from a two-line poem). For what would be the first and last time in my entire secondary education, I felt challenged. From this instructor, I would go on to request feedback on the first chapter draft of a passion project after graduation. You see, at some point, the curtain of a global pandemic had fallen, and I was moved to write a novella of vignettes from the perspective of a secular god. His response was deeply encouraging, and kind. The book – titled Affliction – was vain, and terrible. It can be found and purchased in my Gallery of Failures.
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Once I’d established architecture as my field of study (and lifelong love affair), I left my hometown to move to Toronto: a sprawling metropolis at the heart of a country I’d never even set foot in before – freshly eighteen, without a single contact, in the midst of a global pandemic. I felt empowered to explore every corner of it in any way I could – which ended up being in the most absurd and irrational ways you can imagine – having been restricted by a global pandemic. Despite a strict lockdown, I felt totally free for the first extended period of time in my life. Fondly, I recall nights spent chasing skunks with newfound friends (this is not a metaphor), and I now recognize those moments as integral to building my familiarity with, and adoration for, the city. I found myself in the alleys we claimed, and reinvented pieces I didn’t like. Folks there still call me Cat, which I tried on for size. Others, to this day, know me as Bald, after the bright-idea buzzcut I figured I’d try in the dead of Canadian winter. I wrote feverishly on empty streetcars, designed poorly behind a Zoom screen, and spoke to everyone, everywhere, any time I could.
The city led me to embed myself in activism – I had been radicalized since a child, knowing well the regions of Athens that were perpetually peppered in Antifa graffiti and commie flyers proclaiming a perennial student revolution – but never had the connections, the liberty, the know-how to situate myself in any useful place within the movement. I took the revelations everywhere, brought them home, where they’d reappear years later as I stepped into organizing, and brought them into my designs, where they’d butt heads with the elitist praxis I saw peeking through the cracks of closed doors at my alma mater. Although this rarely worked in my favor, it did land me a spot as a fellow to be published with the School of Cities, where I worked alongside intellectual powerhouses as the youngest fellow, and wrote my first substantial academic paper under the guidance of Dr. Marieme Lo.
After a summer at home, regaling my tales of the first year abroad, I was back again, signing the lease on a cramped four-bedroom for myself and six of my closest friends. My second day back, I realized my pure adoration for the moment in space and time I’d found myself in. Lockdowns everywhere had timidly begun to lift; the city, inch by inch, thawed into life. As everything I had come to know and love about Toronto and my place there changed, I realized that before me was a chance to fall for the city all over again. The impassioned entanglement was really a number of things: it was community, it was activism, it was the rush of nightlife I found working in homey bars, and eventually, the realization that I didn’t have the slightest clue about what architecture really was. So, I kept walking, kept conversing, kept trying. I did my best to savor my studies, looking on in awe at the grandiose stone halls that housed mind-bending lectures, listening with wonder to some of the greatest minds in design thinking. Yet as winter crept in again, I found myself, by every benchmark my professors offered, an academic failure. I lacked the creative resourcefulness that my peers seemed to grasp effortlessly, and questioned my place constantly. A number of my projects certainly earned their harsh markings, and even harsher feedback.
I found myself keeping afloat because of the ardent verbal and written rationalizations that served as scaffolding for each design project, but entirely unable to translate these concepts to visualizations. Not sketches, not diagrams, not 3D models. I missed the mark all year long, and when the promise of a summer studio abroad in my motherland came on my radar, I found myself empty-handed when it came time to apply. Whether by coincidence, mistake, or errant belief in my drawing potential, I soon found myself in the heart of Athens among a cohort of exceptional designers from Toronto and Patras, Greece. On this trip, the love I had for my country really began to flourish – but shockingly, my representation skills failed to appear out of nowhere. Despite my best efforts, I produced yet another installation for my Gallery of Failures – this time earning a piece of feedback that has stuck with me word for word, shaping my journey ever since.
In the middle of a presentation, I was interrupted:
“Just a moment. You speak well, but the meanings behind your words have failed to show themselves anywhere on the page. This is not design, it is theory.”
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Later that summer, back in Chicago at an academic loss, I threw myself into organizing in my community. Spurred by the death of Roe v. Wade, a comrade and I arranged an action that would set into motion the events of the next phase of life. Suffice it to say, I reentered the world of academia that autumn armed with new knowledge, connections, and an entirely new approach to the tools at my disposal that I hoped would carry me through my third and final year of my degree (which I had expedited feverishly to save money on outrageous international fees). That year, I finally began to comprehend the tools of the trade – technically, I became proficient in more than the art of articulation. My pen began to produce cogent points, lines, images rather than just letters and words. My marks and feedback did not by any means reflect this. I squeezed every ounce of meaning I could from my dwindling time in Canada, feeling the value it held without knowing how it would look in retrospect.
One thing seemed clear to me then: I could not afford to stay. So, I left for Chicago after a fabulous but laborious summer spent in community and in preparation. There, I began to pursue a Masters of Architecture degree in the endless sea of desks at the famed S.R. Crown Hall. The first year of my degree was a series of missteps and successes in rapid succession. I found exceptional guidance from a select few professors amongst a tiny cohort of just four other students, and their criticism was instrumental to breaking down everything I thought I knew about why my best efforts still had me failing to succeed. I had unearthed evidence that the failures of my design work were grave mistakes in my comprehension of the design process rather than simply poor technique. Although the year brought thrilling opportunities with photography installations, funded research travel, and professional conferences, I have taken a hiatus from my studies for the 2024-25 academic year and potentially beyond – I want to begin again, from scratch, and I want to do it right.
The summer that followed, put simply, relit the fire under the revolutionary within me. Life forced my hand, necessitating the hiatus I had originally taken by choice: August sent me to the motherland, where I’ve spent time caring for a relative, overseeing (and drawing!) renovations of my father’s childhood home, and for the first time in my life, living out my passions as an Athenian – from community organizing around the metro station listed for Exarcheia Square to establishing myself in local art scenes that have filled my life with newfound and ever-expanding community.
Today, when I think of Toronto, I marvel at how I ever believed I could afford to go. Mere days after my homecoming to Chicago, I will return to the city that stole my heart for a year of work and play, to rekindle the lost love I still feel surfacing within me. Armed with the technical skill for work and the professional connections to find it, I will be seeking employment in the Greater Toronto Area, to observe the design process in the workplace before I return to academia. All these great loves have culminated in this; in my field we hear so often that the hardest part is getting your foot in the door – so I’m putting my best, and most honest, foot forward to proceed.
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Of course, besides passionate affairs, there have been many starburst flings worth mentioning. Over the years, I’ve fallen for floriculture, late-night diners, public transportation, muay thai, behavioral pharmacology, naked-body motorcycles, the New York Times word games, and many, many incredible people and their stories.
In truth, I believe these things are what give me my vivacity and flair.
The latest development has been a torrid entanglement with the writing and life philosophy of Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and my linguistic patron saint, Clarice Lispector. The funds I was awarded for a recent composition went towards purchasing her entire bibliography, which I found by happy accident in a midwestern Barnes and Noble, having never come across her writing before. Since then, I have pored over each page of Near to the Wild Heart, The Chandelier, and The Besieged City; I am currently reading Apple in the Dark at a snail’s pace.
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I consider myself to be a product of the love I had for my environment – and what I really hope my story stands to prove is that the constellation of fascinations that have filled my time are what make a good creative, a good writer, a good designer – no matter the number of failures under her belt.
With this information in hand, I would like to reintroduce myself… preferably, over coffee.