Angela Read

Architectural Designer & Design Technologist

I have always dreamed of becoming an architect ever since I saw Fallingwater, a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I understood what design could do — how a building could feel inevitable, like it had always belonged to that hillside. That feeling stayed with me through a civil engineering program I left, an interior design degree I loved, graduate school in architecture, and study abroad programs in Florence and Copenhagen that changed how I see the world.

Architecture gave me everything I expected it to. Systems thinking. Spatial reasoning. The ability to hold a complex problem in my head and work through it carefully.

Along the way I became increasingly drawn to the technical side of design, how systems are built, not just how they're drawn. That curiosity led me to start learning code alongside my architectural work.

I had always been curious about how computers worked. I just had not followed that curiosity yet.

Taking UX design courses gave it a framework. Learning to code made it real. HTML and CSS felt immediately natural, the same logic and attention to detail that architecture trained in me, just applied to a different medium. I am working through JavaScript now.

My graduate thesis has been cited eight times in published research and viewed by researchers across nearly 100 countries. That depth of focus is not something I learned. It is how I work. I bring it to architecture, UX research, front-end development, and my independent study of AI systems and privacy design.

This is not a shift away from design. It is design, just in more directions.