A Day in Austin With MHOA's Kalen McNamara

Kalen walking the Town Lake loop with her puppy Cass

Kalen McNamara is a Project Architect at Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, based in Austin and Houston, Texas. Her day involves a project in the concepting phase, touching base with AIA Austin Women in Architecture, floorplans for motel rooms, and a run along the greenbelt.

7:00am: My alarm goes off and I wake to the sight of my dog Cass staring down at me, willing me to get up and feed her. She sneaks in a couple licks before I draw the bedroom curtains and greet the Texas sun. Cass does her wiggly breakfast dance while I measure out her food, and I try to let some of that wonderful puppy enthusiasm color my morning. Then we go for a walk and spend some time at the dog park chatting with neighbors.

7:45am: I make coffee and breakfast, usually overnight oats or toast. Like everyone else I got into making sourdough last year, though I have more recently pivoted to yeasted breads and I’ll never look back. I scroll the New York Times app while I eat.

8:30am: Showered and dressed, I open up my laptop and start work for the day. I work as a Project Architect at Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, where projects span from interiors to architecture and masterplanning. Lately the firm has taken on more ‘public realm’ projects, where we’re responsible for the look and feel of the ground-level experience within large mixed-use developments. Most of my work at the firm falls into this public realm category, which includes elements of placemaking, branding, storytelling, and architectural and landscape design. A typical day has me touching on several of these elements for different projects throughout the day.

9:00am: For a project in the concepting phase, I scour the internet for the perfect precedent images, collect words and ideas, and organize it all into a loose narrative. Then I send off a draft to the rest of the team before we meet for feedback; through this iterative process, the design vision starts to take form.

Not all firms would consider this an essential step, but I appreciate that it’s built into the start of every project at MHOA. Establishing design principles early on pays dividends when things start moving fast in schematic design and you need a guide to fall back on.

12:30pm: I take Cass for a quick walk, then have lunch on the balcony. I catch up with the group chat, do some scrolling and swiping on social media, and send emails for any ‘extracurricular’ activities in play. I’m on the AIA Austin Women in Architecture Committee, and recently helped organize a virtual panel event called Making Austin More Equitable. The event convened community leaders, activists, and policymakers to discuss positive growth of historically disinvested neighborhoods.

View from the balcony during the Texapocalypse.

It’s such an important issue for our city, which is only beginning to confront decades of blatantly racist land use policy; the issue is also compounded by rising income inequality and Austin’s insane housing market. But our brilliant panelists gave me hope! It was truly a pleasure to watch them develop a strong rapport and collectively paint a fuller picture of strategies to address this issue.

2:00pm: I jump into a different project and model out a few different massing options for a group of restaurant pavilion buildings arranged around a central lawn. While I like working on projects all across the country, I especially enjoy working on projects in Austin, like this one. Because of the climate and relaxed patio lifestyle (i.e. our stubborn willingness to hang out outside when it’s 90 degrees outside!) you can design for meaningful indoor-outdoor connection and use ample vegetation to soften the architecture, both of which are important to me.

3:30pm: I meet with the rest of the team to review progress on a motel we’re designing. This week I’ve been handling floor plans for the motel rooms. Nothing else in architecture puts me in a trance quite like working on a nice tight floor plan, and I tend to disappear for hours while I puzzle through them. That was ideal when I was working on my grad school thesis project, but in a professional setting I’m still learning how to curb my tunnel vision!

5:30pm: I send out progress PDFs to various teams, review my schedule for the next day, and ceremoniously close my laptop.

6:00pm: After I’ve fed Cass, we head to the dog park just outside my apartment building. It’s been a godsend for socializing her (and me!) during this strange year. It’s one of the few apartment complexes I’ve lived in where neighbors actually use shared amenity spaces and get to know each other. Some of that is thanks to our dogs, but it’s certainly helped by thoughtful design and landscaping. Communal spaces do so much work for our quality of life; my hope is that especially post-Covid, real estate developers will see their value and prioritize them within the new housing developments that our country desperately needs.

“Getting a drink with a friend” during early pandemic times

6:45pm: Before dinner, I might go for a run along the greenbelt near my place, or drive down to Town Lake for a sunset walk with my friend Courtney. I am very ill-suited to a desk job, and I’ve found that the amount of time I spend exercising outside is directly proportional to my overall wellbeing.

7:45pm: I get home and start cooking dinner. My family has always been very into food and wine, and cooking dinner is an important part of my day. My natural tendency is to multitask and try to work as quickly as possible like I do in my job, but I really enjoy when I’m able to be slow and deliberate, prep all the vegetables before turning on the burner, and appreciate cooking as the self-care activity that it can be. My parents are both amazing cooks, and my mom is always gifting me more kitchen gadgets. For Christmas she gave me an immersion blender, which I’ve been using to make all kinds of delicious soups to pair with my homemade ‘artisan’ bread. Pro tip for fellow bread fiends: invest in a long-slot toaster!

8:30pm: FaceTimeing friends, social media browsing, and/or watching TV (recent favorites include Search Party, I May Destroy You, and Call My Agent). At this point I often fall into an internet vortex in pursuit of my latest apartment decoration, home organization, or ill-advised online shopping pursuit.

10:45pm: The wind-down period commences. I’ve never been a great sleeper, but being hardcore about sleep hygiene definitely helps. I take Cass out one last time, then indulge her bedtime zoomies with some fetch and tug-of-war. After rinsing off, I get in bed with a book. Some friends and I started a book club last year, and it’s exposed me to so many stories and ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have crossed my radar. While the book club selections are mostly fiction, on my own I tend to read nonfiction; major topics lately include dog behavior and the housing market. After a chapter or so, lights out and I drift off to sleep.