“Be prepared to reinvent yourself several times throughout your career. I think it's important not to become static. Things may change, practice may not be exactly what you anticipated. The last few years have shown that there are many, many ways to practice architecture. Be nimble, be curious, and stick with it.”
Elaine Molinar is a Partner and Managing Director at Snohetta. She began her career as a designer of the Alexandria Library in Egypt after participating in the initial conception for Snøhetta’s winning competition entry. Throughout her time with Snøhetta, Elaine has held key positions in major cultural projects and competitions in Canada, the Middle East, Europe and the United States including the award-winning Norwegian National Opera & Ballet and James B. Hunt Jr Library at NCSU. In 2005, she helped found Snøhetta’s New York office after the firm was awarded the National September 11th Memorial Museum Pavilion at the World Trade Center in 2004, the office’s first commission in the Americas. Elaine currently leads the general management of Snøhetta’s US practice.
Elaine’s commitment to the issues of social and physical well-being influences her work not only as a design leader but also as an employer and cultivator of Snøhetta’s growing practice. Her early training in classical dance and performance brings an insightful understanding of ergonomics, perception, and comfort to the environments we design and inhabit. Her experience in the design of theaters, libraries, and the workplace has given Elaine an in-depth understanding of complex programmatic issues and has positioned her well to champion design from the user’s point of view.
Elaine’s work has led to numerous international awards and recognition including the Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries, AIA/ALA American Library Award, and an AIA Presidential citation, among others. Elaine has served as guest lecturer, studio critic, and awards juror in addition to daily practice. She is a member of the American Institute of Architects and is a LEED accredited professional.
"There's always so much to learn in this profession, and the target keeps moving. Technology changes, innovations change, politics change, everything changes. Generational mindsets are constantly evolving. That's one of the aspects that I love about this profession - it's not finite, so you can't master it and then repeat, repeat, repeat. It's not really like that. You can always move forward.”
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Catherine Meng: I wanted to start back at the beginning. I know you started your career at Snohetta, and you've basically been there since the very beginning and worked on the Alexandria Library competition entry. So you still remember what you were thinking or what you felt when it was announced that Snohetta was the winner of that competition?
Elaine Molinar: I had been out of school, maybe a year by then, working in Los Angeles, and it was a little bit unreal, or surreal or hard to believe. It didn't really sink in, not for me anyway. I wasn't thinking about what it meant for a career or a practice. I just thought it was cool.
CM: When did it sink in that it was real?
EM: Oh, maybe about five years later, when we finally got a contract for the work, because it took years of negotiating and doing some interim studies. And meanwhile, we were doing other things and doing other work. But that took a while and still even then it's kind of unreal, because it occupies a special place in the imagination of many, with its rich history. And it's a really a kind of amazing, otherworldly place if you're not from that culture or the surrounding region. And it's not really in the forefront of your thinking and on a daily basis, to work on something like that so early in my career was really unique. I think I kind of knew that, compared to what my friends were doing. I remember thinking that the experience I was getting was taking a long time, you know, because that was such an immense undertaking, and complex and required a lot of people, certainly a lot more expertise than I had, because I was just starting out. But I remember a lot of my friends who were going through projects at a much faster pace being, "Oh, my God, they're getting such great experience. And this is moving so slowly!" But it really was fascinating. Every minute of it.
CM: I try and put myself in that position and I imagine what it would feel like as a 27, 28 year old, who just won this huge international competition. Like, that just makes me so stressed like, my heart is racing right now! Was there any self doubt in those early days?
EM: Yeah, I think it's a profession that is rife with self doubt. I was a very willing and eager team member for this competition team, but I wasn't one of the people shouldering the responsibility of at all - those were my colleagues who were more in that position than I was. I was just thinking of really getting into the work itself. I was really eager to learn and to draw, and to learn about buildings and build them. That's my focus.
CM: Early on in your career, you're drawing things that maybe you hadn't necessarily done before. What was your process for, learning the things that you hadn't done before?
EM: Well, one thing that was new is that once we started working on the library, we transitioned from hand drawing to computers, to AutoCAD. That soon became very second hand - like drawing by hand, but just with a digital pen. And the library had a complex geometry that we didn't fully understand ourselves. It wasn't pure circle. So we didn't know quite how to approach that. Tt was the early days of digital drawing and understanding that real life construction site tolerances are very different than the precision that you can get with a digital tool in a digital process. When you're really young, you kind of move ahead blindly. And that's a good thing. You know, you're just focused on what what you're focused on, and things work themselves out somehow.
CM: Yeah, I think a lot of people say similar things were if they had known what they know now, earlier on in their careers, it would have, stopped them from doing a lot of things.
EM: I know! One of the great things about that competition, though, was that it was extremely well prepared. The competition documentation was very thorough, and very straightforward, very well informed in terms of the design of libraries, and the way that the state that libraries were at that point in time. So it was extremely clear and very easy to follow. And we didn't try to reinvent it. That was a great learning process too that was pretty cool.
CM: When was the last time you visited the library? Do you ever go back and visit old projects?
EM: Yeah, when it's possible. We work all over the world, so our work here is all over the Americas and all over other parts of the world as well. So it's not an automatic routine thing, but it is a great learning tool. You know, I've been back and forth to Norway quite a lot, and seen the Opera House many times. And I always try and think back what I thought was important then, what we discussed in terms of design, and then trying to figure out if that really mattered, if it made a difference. Was it misplaced? Was it on target? That's kind of interesting, and things that you don't anticipate. So when we were designing the library for Alexandria, we did not anticipate the general interest that it would have. So there were a lot of tourists who came to the library just to see it as a work of Architecture. And there were changes that were made to the interior circulation of the building that were changes that were made by the librarian to deal with that and that level of interest. Had we been aware of that, you know, the interior planning might have been slightly different. When we were designing the University Library in Toronto, at Ryerson University, there was one particular floor, which we called The Beach, which has these beautiful stepped landscapes on the entire floor. And it's one of the most popular forests in the library. And every Thursday night, people started breakdancing there. And using that space for activities very different than what we anticipated, not just for studying, or having downtime or social time. Things like that you don't really anticipate.
CM: The only Snohetta project I've been to, other than Times Square, is the SFMoMA in San Francisco. They do this thing once a year and it's basically their annual fundraiser. And then afterwards, there's an afterparty in the museum throughout the entire building for the general public. I've been a couple years, and I always wonder, if, when Snohetta was designing SFMoMA, if they anticipated that there would be this huge afterparty, where people are just wandering the museum at night with a drink in hand. When you're designing something, what you think will happen in a space is totally different than what might actually happen.
EM: There are always surprises. Museums today have to be so many different things. Not only do they have art to share with world, but they have to be retail, they have to sell things, they have to provide food. And there's a certain level of entertainment that they have to provide, in addition to the classic museum experience, because they have to cater to all kinds of needs to be able to capture people who have come experience art. That kind of thing is very much in their minds. So when we're working together, they know that they have to have a party and a range of different kinds of events. And so that's very much in their mind.
CM: I wanted to fast forward a little bit. You're the managing director of Snohetta in the Americas. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you grew into that role over the years.
EM: I used to be a designer and do projects, and I loved working with engineers and clients and drawing and all that. At some point in time, how work gets produced, I found to be at least as interesting, if not a little bit more interesting, than doing the work itself. I really wanted to have that broader view of what being an architect is, rather than just being buried in a project all day and buried in drawing, which I loved. But I really wanted to step back and take a broader view. And I had that opportunity because we were able to expand our practice to North America. That was after we were awarded the commission at the World Trade Center site. That was my opportunity to take that step back and learn about practice, observe how we work, how we should be working. Working alone is is a fairly singular, very straightforward process. Once you add another person to the mix, or more, that dynamic becomes really intriguing. The relationship between human behavior and creative output is really fascinating to me.
CM: What's your day to day like? What exactly do you do in your role as a Managing Director?
EM: Every day is different, and I have to say, I really enjoy the variety. This past year, though, I would say it's been an anomaly. As we all know, we're all working from home. And so we're not in all together in the studio. It's very hard to take the temperature of the studio, when you're not with and among people. There are fewer clues as to how things are going and how people are doing. When you're in the studio, you can tell pretty quickly if a team is getting burned out or something else really exciting is happening. However, if this pandemic had happened a decade or more ago, I think we all would have been in a much more challenging place. We wouldn't have had this technology, we would have had a lot of phone calls, a lot of tired ears and a lot of email, but even less connection than we have now.
EM: I spend most of my days talking! Talking to people, talking to my colleagues, my partners, who really spend a lot of their time with our project teams and our design team. We take that deep dive into the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and our HR team and our finance team. Stitching that all together, finding the balance between financial health and viability and design at all costs. Design is what we do, we're designers, but we have to be in a stable financial situation. So finding that middle ground, and that balance between those varied interests, is the space that I live in.
CM: What would you say has been an unexpectedly challenging part of managing the practice?
EM: Well, everything!
EM: I think just when you feel like you're in a good place - things are stable, things are working well, you have a nice set of contracts to work on, everything's going well - things happen all at once, like some disaster strikes. It might be recession, or you might lose a job or two, you might have a difficult client, or there might be a natural disaster, pandemic, or personal challenge or illness. And those things generally don't happen one at a time at your convenience, so you can deal with them in a straightforward way. They often happen all at once. Growing from a small group to the size we are now, it was hard to anticipate that you need to put frameworks in place. You can't be everywhere, you can't learn from everybody, you will only interact with a small group of people on any given day. It's kind of exciting, but very difficult to anticipate how you might scale up in practice.
CM: I think a lot of younger professionals, both men and women that I've talked to, feel like they need to have a set plan for like their careers. Whereas when I speak with people who are more advanced in their careers, more often than not, they say things just happened. They didn't plan for things to happen, things just happened organically or opportunities just came up along the way, and they just took them. It wasn't like they plotted out their career path. What advice would you have for people who are towards the beginning of their careers, who are unsure of what they want to do, or what they want to do next? How should they mentally approach this idea that you might not actually know what you're supposed to be doing for the next 5, 10, 20 years of your of your life?
EM: Well, I think it's important to think about what your interests are within the world of architecture and within your profession. What is it that you really care about and value within the world of architecture? For example, if you have an interest in low income housing, or contributing to the built environment in that way, but the firm you work at doesn't do that, then it might be time for a change. If you're interested in leadership, or maybe having your own practice one day, then it's important to try and get a well rounded experience and to expose yourself to all aspects of practice. Whether or not you take a deep dive into marketing, or the finance of projects - you need to be aware of how they work. Try and think about how they all fit together, and then go about getting that different kind of exposure. If you have a little downtime where your project is between phases and you have some time, and there's something you're interested in that you see another project team working on or something happening studio that want to learn about, then you should volunteer your time or ask to be taught something. You should talk to your manager about what your interests are, and they can have that in mind when they're assigning you tasks. It's very important to be observant, not only about the work itself, but about how work gets done.
CM: It sounds like you need to have a combination of being self-aware of what you want to do, but not being so stressed out about it that that's all you focus on.
EM: Yes, absolutely.
CM: Your husband is Craig Dykers, who is one of the cofounders of Snohetta, and there's so many examples of husband-wife architecture practices, but maybe because of Snohetta's size, or because the firm isn't named after a person or people, it's not really like a prototypical husband-wife firm. And I have to admit, I didn't even know that Craig was your partner until relatively recently. But I wanted to ask what it has been like working alongside each other all these years, since the very beginning?
EM: It's been fun! The fun never stops. We've been very good at leaving our personal lives at home, when we go to work. It's a little bit harder to leave work at work when we come home. We also have an ownership responsibility. So it always stays with you all the time, but we've been very good about keeping home at home. I find Craig incredibly inspiring, incredibly interesting and he has a really broad approach to design that I find really fascinating.
CM: Since you've been at Snohetta since the beginning, do you view yourself as one of the cofounders?
EM: I don't know, I don't really think about it!
CM: I only asked because I don't feel Snohetta is necessarily a Starchitect firm, even though it's very well known. But I do feel like Craig's name is often out there and in the press and media, and there's New Yorker articles and New York Times articles that he's in, and I wonder if you ever feel like, "What about me? I've been there too!" Or if you just don't really think about it that way.
EM: I don't really think about it that way, because we each have a different kind of impact on the practice. My work has been very satisfying to me.
CM: Did you ever think about leaving and working somewhere else and then coming back?
EM: I did many years ago, as there were quite a few years where the economy was really rough, and we had not so much work to do. We were doing competition after competition, so it was kind of hard to get through something, build work and get through that entire process.
CM: It feels like you're at the top of your game now! What do you want to do for the next phase of your career?
EM: I don't know if I agree with that!
CM: Well at least from the outside looking in, it looks like that!
EM: There's always so much to learn in this profession, and the target keeps moving. Technology changes, innovations change, politics change, everything changes. Generational mindsets are constantly evolving. As a designer, or thinking about design, I don't think you can ever get there. That's one of the aspects that I love about this profession - it's not finite, so you can't master it and then repeat, repeat, repeat. It's not really like that. You can always move forward.
CM: Is there anything in particular that you still hope to achieve, or work on that you haven't been able to work on yet?
EM: Our practice is over 30 years old now at this point, and thinking about the next generation and making that happen. Ensuring that there is the next generation in place is something that we need to achieve, but we don't really have in place yet. So I definitely want to focus on that.
CM: I've talked with some people where I think for some, it's kind of weird when you have to start thinking about this so called succession plan, and how will things continue on after they leave the practice.
EM: It is a strange thought but a necessary one.
CM: What would you say has been a highlight of your career so far?
EM: I didn't know if it would be any one moment. But I think having the opportunity to set up our practice and grow it here in the United States has definitely been a highlight for me. It's an opportunity I probably wouldn't have had otherwise. And it's been really satisfying. It's not easy, and there are ups and downs, but that's why I think it's still very rewarding.
CM: Do you have a favorite project that you've worked on?
EM: A lot. They all have their qualities for different reasons. I would say working on the Oslo Opera House, was one of my favorites. I was a longtime ballet student, whose grown up performing on stages and used dozens of ballet rehearsal rooms. So knowing all of the ins and outs of what dancers need, what makes their rehearsal and performing life tick in a really smooth way, that was great. I loved it.
We are now doing a children's museum in my hometown, El Paso, Texas. That's definitely been a highlight of my career for sure. I never thought I would be able to have that opportunity. I would sum that up with these two words: pride and pressure. El Paso has a really magnificent historical architectural legacy, and I grew up loving the architecture in El Paso before I was really aware that architecture was a profession. Being able to have a impact in that way is great. The great thing about being an architect is that your work will outlive you, if you're lucky, for a long time. I'm looking forward to that project being a success.
CM: You mentioned being a dancer or studying dancing. What's interesting is I feel like in these interviews, there are sort of three general majors or childhood interests that people have. The most common one is people who are interested in the science and art and math combination. And then there's a second group of people who were really interested in psychology. So they really wanted to understand how people think and why people do what they do. And then there's a third group of people who were former dancers. It seems like everyone falls into one of these categories, and I find that really, really fascinating.
EM: Well, dance is a very three dimensional spatial activity. You're very aware of your physical surroundings, and how you navigate space. So I think that there's kind of a natural connection.
CM: How did you first discover architecture?
EM: Almost by accident. I had always loved the historic building landscape in my hometown, but I never really thought about it as a profession. So I went off to college, I went to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and I didn't really know exactly what I wanted to pursue. I was taking art classes and I was in a technical drawing class that was taught by an architect. In Fort Worth, the Kimbell Art Museum is there and I used to spend a lot of time there. My friends and I would go to the Kimbell on the weekends, and we would either just kick a ball about the grounds or go to the galleries. I didn't really make the connection until that drawing teacher I had told me that that's what architects did, and that I should consider architecture. So that's what I did, and then I transferred into the architecture program at UT Austin.
CM: So I'm gonna start to wrap up with the lightning round questions. What is one piece of advice you have for someone just starting out in their career,
EM: Be prepared to reinvent yourself several times throughout your career. I think it's important not to become static. Things may change, practice may not be exactly what you anticipated. The last few years have shown that there are many, many ways to practice architecture and it's not limited to the architectural industry anymore. Be nimble, be curious, stick with it. Be patient.
CM: What is something you find really inspiring right now? EM: Beethoven. I think last year, he was being celebrated for 250 years since his birth. He just he wears his emotions on his sleeve in very powerful and also delicate ways, which are just really, really beautiful. He was great storyteller.
CM: What's funny or interesting fact about yourself?
EM: I'm an amateur taxidermist in my spare time.
CM: How did you get into that?
EM: Kind of randomly. I've always been interested in science and anatomy and I love animals and I'm a big animal lover. Someone I knew who is a scientist said it might be something I might like to learn and there were some classes happening in my neighborhood. So I did that.
CM: How do you procure the animals or species?
EM: First and foremost, I only work with food sources. In my case, it's primarily mice. And they are provided for reptiles and other animals that eat them. So they're frozen, they're at peace. And I use those. And it's in unconventional and not straightforward ways. Sometimes they're very abstract.
CM: It's so fascinating. I feel like I just spend the whole rest of the interview talking about that!
EM: I would say living form is the ultimate three-dimensional landscape.
CM: The last one is a mentor shout out. And so who is someone who has been a great mentor or inspiration to you that you'd like to give a shout out to?
EM: I find working with Craig, my partner, has been incredibly inspiring. His outlook on life and his outlook on design and architecture is endlessly inspiring. I also find that the new, talented generation that's emerging now to be really inspiring and that makes me hopeful for the future.