Student Portfolio Review

Thursday, Feb. 12 (12-1:30pm)

Urban Guild is hosting a virtual portfolio and resume review for architecture and design students seeking professional feedback on their work. The event will begin with a moderated panel discussion, followed by small breakout rooms where students can receive personalized, one-on-one feedback from practicing professionals.

This event is for student members only, if you need support with this membership fee please reach out to info@urbanguild.org

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The Panelists

Sara Bega

Bega Design Studio

  • Sara Bega’s work is dedicated to the creation of enduring built environments that celebrate valued traditions and cultures. Her design and consulting projects with Bega Design Studio explore pedestrian-priority urbanism and timeless local architecture.

    Bega is former Town Architect of Las Catalinas, a hilltown on Costa Rica’s Guanacaste coast. For over a decade she led architectural and urban design efforts, developing strategies for car-free urbanism filled with vernacular architecture. Throughout her tenure, Bega’s design work focused on fabric buildings, public spaces, and micro-phased neighborhood plans. Las Catalinas received a CNU Charter Award (2022) and Urban Guild Design Excellence Awards (2020).

    Bega is also an Adjunct Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, where she teaches studio classes on contextual design process.

Lauren Kelly

MK Design Group

  • Lauren Kelly, originally from Maryland, has spent her entire career, since 2005, directly involved in the design, regulation, and implementation of great places, both old and new. She has a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Miami, and has worked for several of architects and town planners who were founders of, and are integrally embedded into, the tradition of New Urbanism and traditional placemaking.

    Her career began in architecture and town planning at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company where she worked on many charrettes and planning initiatives, including post-Katrina New Orleans rebuilding, Learning Cottages, and form-based code calibrations, and where she co-authored The Light Imprint: integrating Sustainability and Community Design. 

    After relocating to Beaufort, SC and working with Brown Design Studio for several years, she she transitioned to the public sector in the City of Beaufort Planning Department. She learned to sit at the other side of the proverbial and literal table, administering the development standards, serving as the City Architect, designing civic buildings, and helping to write the form-based code for the city.

    After 8 years with the city, she returned to the private sector  with Moser Design Group, now MK Design Group. She holds professional license in South Carolina. In her free time, she enjoys running, hiking, and spending time with her husband and three children.

Louis Nequette

Nequette
Architecture & Design

  • A native of Birmingham, Alabama and a graduate of Auburn University’s architecture program, Louis has always been fascinated with the creation of place. At an early age, he found art as a conduit for his expression and identity which lead him to architecture as a field of study.

    After graduating from Auburn, Louis combined his early work experience and his volunteer firefighting background to land an opportunity to start a new firm and design two fire stations in the Birmingham area. One was the first commercial building in a new town called Mt. Laurel where he was introduced to New Urbanism and started learning the principles of traditional neighborhood development. Even though much of his earlier work was highlighted by custom residential projects, this enlightenment of community planning has been a foundation in Louis’ work ever since.

    “It’s all about community building. Architecture is nothing but an opportunity to bring people together. It can segregate or create community. I don’t think people realize how much community planning has an effect on political life.”

    Louis has always been as interested in the business relationships with developers and the clients – the people – just as much as the beautiful work. These two types of work, custom-driven and developer-driven, can form a dialogue with each other, where a cross-pollination of ideas from one can inform the other.

    Louis focuses his collaborative energies to innovate new solutions for community building in the 21st century. Whether it be student housing villages, multi-family buildings in new town centers, infill mixed-use buildings in downtown, or market-rate residential neighborhoods, all of these building types help shape our public realm and create community. For Louis Nequette, the real strength of architecture is not necessarily the buildings, but it is the space between the buildings, the community nurtured by planning and beauty.