Design Professional with comprehensive experience in all aspects of design and construction as Owner, Architect and Contractor in private, public, developer and institutional settings as well as expertise in planning, design and leadership of large, complex projects and teams.

A creative and a natural leader who happened to be good at math and academics in addition to the arts. At the urging of others, Joe studied structural engineering at Purdue University in Indiana where he grew up. He moved on to construction management out of college, opting to work in the field as an Assistant Superintendent to learn how to put buildings together before becoming a construction project manager for a prominent Chicago GC/CM. He worked on commercial high rise, public, and institutional health care projects among others. Seeking greater involvement in the early conceptual stages of projects, he went to work for a former client managing design and construction of large public institutional projects. When the administration for which he worked left office, he enrolled in the College of Architecture at IIT to scratch the creative itch that had been haunting him all along.

He became a development manager on high rise multi-family projects for a prominent Chicago real estate developer - another former client - working half days to support himself through full time graduate architecture school. Subsequent to private development, he migrated to a prominent local university where he oversaw design and construction of medical research laboratories, med center renovations and master planning before becoming a project manager for ZGF Architects on the Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. Following ZGF, he designed and developed food testing laboratories across the country during the Great Recession, and managed design of high rise multi-family and commercial projects for FitzGerald Associates Architects.

Thus, he turned early false starts into the advantage of becoming an Architect with real world experience as a builder and a developer with mastery of the underlying physics that make the best architectural designs work, while becoming inspired by the power of design to make the world a better place and improve people’s lives.

aia, NCARB, licensed in the state of Illinois