I had early hands-on exposure to design long before architecture school - shaping pineblocks into half-models of boat hulls with old-school draw blade, chisel, and rasp; constructing a free-school in a 19th-century church and parsonage in rural Vermont; building theatrical sets and the Boston Flower Show; renovating an old stone schoolhouse to equestrian hostel in the French countryside.  I studied architectural history at Harvard College and took my self-taught drawing skills to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where I studied with Gerhard Kallmann.  In the 1980s I cut my teeth in Chicago working for Ben and Cindy Weese, Helmut Jahn, and Larry Booth on projects of all size and scope -- the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi; a pioneering 5-acre urban redevelopment anchored by a new flagship gourmet grocery store and 30 rowhouses; and the reinvention of 19th-century lofts in the West Loop.

In my own design practice I’ve been lucky to work with clients ranging from artists to young families to homeless veterans.  Intuition plays a big part in how I solve problems, using the tools of architecture to make something that was once nothing.  By shaping exterior form and interior space in response to client need and context, I hope to enhance the meaning of the places we inhabit and use every day, instilling a heightened awareness of surroundings - form and space and the openness between - with balance and restraint.

Outside practice? Sketching and writing. An occasional, energizing summer workshop with walnut and squid ink at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, plus ongoing tweaking of my travelogue Encounters with Enigma, a meditation on architecture and history that chronicles a 2000 trip to Russia and Uzbekistan, continue to hone the way I see the world and the skills and experience we bring to solving problems through design.

Sukie Amory, GardeneR

Radcliffe, the University of London, and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management prepared me for my first passion -- working with arts and media organizations, including the Bayreuth Opera Festival, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, and CBS-TV in Chicago.  I found my true passion for horticulture while creating cottage, rose and shade gardens around our small house in Brookline.  Clients saw what we’d created and asked for help on their own landscapes.  I’ve taken many courses on botany and horticulture but have found that good old-fashioned hands-in-the-soil experience enhances both our designs for gardens and my writing for the British garden quarterly HORTUS, dubbed ‘the New Yorker of horticultural reading’, where I’ve written on gardens from Massachusetts to Ukraine.  www.hortus.co.uk    Our Brookline garden has been recognized in the Smithsonian Archive of American Gardens, the Boston Globe Magazine, Fine Gardening, and Outside the Not So Big House.  We now experiment with plant combinations in our garden near Duxbury Bay.

Thaddeus Hrabota, AIA.

With a BA in Architecture from Ball State University and over a decade working with Amory Architects in our Boston studio, TJ now calls South Carolina home, leading his own practice – BotaArch - and collaborating with us on design and documentation of many of our projects.  He shares our love of gardens and has created his own haven of sweetgrass, Camellias and Carolina Jasmine in the more tropical Hardiness Zone 9 of Charleston.