Antonia Devine, AIA, LEED AP is the Senior Director of Planning & Development at Tishman Speyer where she works across planning, design and development on mixed-use, residential and hospitality projects including the redevelopment of Rockefeller Center. Prior to Tishman Speyer, Antonia was the Senior Director of Design & Development at JDS Development Group, where she led design from planning through construction for landmark residential projects including The American Copper Buildings, 111 West 57th Street, The Brooklyn Tower and Fitzroy.

She has worked as an architectural designer at TenBerke and Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates in New York, London and Hong Kong. Antonia is on the faculty at the Yale School of Architecture and was the 2025 Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellow. She has guest lectured at Columbia GSAPP and Harvard GSD. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History & Italian from Princeton University, and a Master of Architecture I from the Yale School of Architecture. A native New Yorker, she lives on the Upper West Side with her husband and two daughters. In her spare time, she reads murder mysteries, plays gin rummy, and has been renovating a house in Lucca with her husband. You can find her on Instagram at @antoniadevine.

6:00am: Our kids climb into bed with us every morning. I often wake up to an elbow in the ribs, but I know these cuddles are short-lived so we try to enjoy them.

The first order of business is always coffee. We love Joe's Amsterdam blend. One of my architecture school classmates, Alex Chabla, is a very talented ceramicist who made coffee mugs perfectly sized for my hand. As true architects, we went through a whole shop drawing process with redlined sketches and glaze samples before we arrived on the final design. Now I can't use anything else!

6:15am: My husband, Scott, and I are renovating a rental property outside of Lucca and I try to catch my contractors six hours ahead. I studied Italian in school but never thought I'd have to learn technical phrases like, "Please fumigate the termites in the wood beams." Useful, if humbling. We’ve been our own developers for the project, conducting a market analysis, underwriting a proforma, overseeing design, creating our own branding and marketing, and beginning to run operations.

6:45am: I lace up and do a quick loop around the Central Park reservoir. I rarely listen to music and just focus on clearing my head for the day.

7:25am: I take my older daughter to the bus, while my husband takes our younger one to Pre-K in the neighborhood. We stop for bagels at Broad Nosh around the corner.

Antonia with her great-grandmother’s monocle.

8:00am: Over the course of the day I could be on a construction site, at office meetings, teaching at Yale, or having drinks with a colleague at Pebble Bar, so I aim for a polished yet versatile look. Jeans, a white t-shirt and an oversized Attersee blazer tend to do the trick. My great-grandmother, Antonia, for whom I am named, was a seamstress in the 1920s and I wear her old monocle as a necklace. On my subway commute I sneak in a chapter of something on my Kindle; I'm a big murder mystery fan and love anything by Anthony Horowitz, Tana French or Richard Osman.

8:30am: Tishman Speyer's headquarters are in Rockefeller Center and it is amazing to work in — and work on — such an iconic, historic campus. We embarked on the redevelopment of Rockefeller Center before Covid, revitalizing it to ensure that it remains the city’s most dynamic shopping, dining and culture destination and best place to work for the next generation of New Yorkers.

The concourse opened in 2023 and we are currently renovating our ice skating-related infrastructure and interiors, all to open in Winter 2026. I stop by the site to survey the work in progress, as well as to review shop drawings and samples. As a native New Yorker who grew up shopping at Rockefeller Center in the early 2000s — and whose mom used to ice skate there as a kid herself in the 1960s — I take very seriously the call to be a responsible steward of the hundred-year old campus for future generations.

1:00pm: I pick up lunch from Miznon. I’m obsessed with the broken rotisserie chicken pita and try to limit myself to getting it once a week. Warm weather permitting, I eat it at Radio Park, an exquisite 24,000 square foot green space on the roof of Radio City Music Hall that has quickly become a favorite destination to relax, collaborate, or socialize for those who work at the Center. It opened five years ago, bringing to fruition part of the original Rockefeller Center design.

2:00pm: I head back up to my office and switch gears to review some proposed designs for one of our historic interiors, including reviewing archival photos, budgets and presentation drafts. When I first moved from a traditional architecture practice to the owner’s side as a real estate developer, I worried that I would be leaving design behind. But over the past ten years I’ve found that I engage regularly with design within the broader built environment, finding creativity in many components of zoning, entitlements, feasibility, strategy, and operations.

6:00pm: I head home to my kids who are playing gin rummy with my parents. We all live in the same building, and have fully embraced communal, multi-generational living — and the free babysitting!

7:00pm: On busy weekdays, we typically order in Vietnamese from Saiguette or Two Wheels.

8:00pm: I love reading to our girls. We toggle between D'Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, Encyclopedia Brown, and anything about dragons. We get through one chapter of The Dragon’s Apprentice before I hear my 5 ½ year old gently snoring.

9:00pm: I'm big on early bedtimes, but before I turn out the light, I squeeze in some course prep. This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar at the Yale School of Architecture on hybrid roles for the architect in the development lifecycle, inspired by what I do in real life. It’s wonderful to give back and help guide the next generation, but it’s a very early train on Thursdays. I fall asleep to Midsomer Murder reruns — love a cozy British murder mystery!

This piece has been edited and condensed for clarity.

A Day in New York City with Tishman Speyer's Antonia Devine