This summer, I assisted with two projects at ONE. The first involved graphic production and urban resiliency design for three cities in Indonesia, for the World Bank. The second involved editing and diagram creation for a book on water-infrastructure related projects titled Building With Nature. I enjoyed the combination of two projects – the first allowed me to explore urban design possibilities in greater depth and detail for specific sites, while the second allowed me to gain an appreciation for a variety of water-related infrastructural measures for different site conditions. ONE Architecture and Urbanism in New York consults on public projects for municipalities in the United States, as well as internationally. The firm advises on integrating community engagement into the design process for infrastructure projects, and community engagement was indeed a process that was emphasized in both the report for the World Bank project, and also highlighted and dissected in numerous chapters in the Building With Nature book. ONE works exclusively on publicly-funded or grant-funded planning projects, where resiliency is a primary aim.

The M.Arch program at GSAPP had equipped me with most of the software knowledge and adaptive design skills that I applied directly to the internship. I utilized Rhino and Adobe Creative Suite for the majority of my work, producing 3D models and drawings, such as sectional studies and diagrams that helped visualize our resiliency design principles. Soft skills came in handy too. The ability to quickly synthesize design feedback from meetings and design interventions in a way that prioritized water, people of all socio-economic strata, and the environment, was something that I picked up through our integrative technologies course last semester.

During the school year and on partner projects, I’ve always been drawn to crafting narratives and using them to guide the sequence of presentations and drawings. This skill came in handy during the book project. I was comfortable with editing the raw text that non-English speakers sent our way and parsing down the text for relevant information to convey through accompanying diagrams.

As most of my internship was conducted remotely, I was never fully on-boarded into the company. There was a level of discomfort on Zoom, especially when most of us were on mute and had our cameras off most of the time. I had a difficult time relating to my colleagues and was quite unsure about expectations and whether I was meeting them. Additionally, my first few weeks at ONE came at a hectic time for the World Bank project. The work schedule was often erratic, with the workday sometimes lasting much longer than eight hours, but sometimes much shorter. This hampered my personal work, so I reached out to ask for more advance notice for heavier workloads. Granted, ONE’s unique role on the World Bank project meant the team was often unable to predict their work in advance, but my teammates did try their best to be more communicative after I reached out. In addition, I became more proactive in connecting with colleagues after around half of the internship had elapsed, and met a few of them in person, which made a world of difference.

Through both projects, I gained a working knowledge and deeper appreciation for the complex process by which socially-oriented and resiliency-targeted projects are developed and implemented. I learned QGIS, a powerful tool that will be instrumental with my own mapping exercises for other projects in the future.

As a designer, I was surprised to find that I learned much more from editing a book than from urban design:Each chapter taught me a deeper level of nuance on water-related infrastructure than I had known before. I look up to Justine, the project manager for our Building with Nature book project and look forward to carrying some of her wisdom forward into my own career aspirations. I was amazed by the fact that ONE hadn’t worked on book projects before, so the editorial role was a new one for the company. I aspire to work at a company, and with like-minded colleagues, that are similarly comfortable about taking on new roles in order to open new avenues of thought and engagement in fields they are passionate about.