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Designing
a Career in Business, as an Architect
8/1/2006
By
Ingrid Spencer
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| Winnie Lee |
Like most young architects, when Winnie Lee,
AIA, graduated with her B.Arch. from Carnegie Mellon University,
in Pittsburgh, she imagined a future world full of buildings of
her design. And despite her architecture professors’ advice
to graduates to “cast a wide net” during the economically
turbulent 1990s, Lee went to work for a small firm in Chicago. From
that point on, however, she kept an open mind about her career,
and 10 years and one M.B.A. later, she works in corporate real estate,
as a management consultant for massive global management consulting
firm Deloitte Consulting in Chicago.
"I currently provide consulting services
to corporations with capital assets,” says Lee, “and focus
on areas such as portfolio management, facility strategies, and
capital construction.” A far cry from designing buildings,
but for Lee, it seems not only satisfying, but a better fit for
her personality. After graduating, she worked for a firm that was
looking for ways to expand its services, and Lee was put on a project
to digitize property asset information for clients. She found that
she had a natural inclination for the diligent, systematic organization
involved. “It was my entry into this world called real estate,”
she says.
From there, Lee was offered a job in New York
City for a hospital’s facility management department. Run like
a studio, it was morphing into an atypical model—the architects
in the department were the architects of record for expansion projects,
and they managed projects and real estate much the way Lee had experienced
at her previous job. “I transitioned with my jobs,” says
Lee. “And I realized that I enjoyed the management side more
than getting my hands dirty. Most architects want to see their designs
materialized, and they have to ‘sell’ their ideas to clients.
I found that on the management side I had more control of the outcome.”
A few years ago, Lee went back to school,
getting her M.B.A from the Stern School of Business at New York
University. Armed with a knowledge of building technology and design,
facility management, as well as business and finance, she joined
a large firm doing predesign work emphasizing the business case
of why and how much a company should build, divest, or lease. From
there, she moved into corporate real estate.
Despite the pressure of often being “the
only woman in the room,” and the acknowledgement that some
business environments are less supportive of employees having lives
outside of the office, Lee enjoys the work and the salary (Lee quoted
a recent Wall Street Journal salary survey that says M.B.A. graduates
going into corporate real estate can begin with a salary range starting
at $80,000), and she defies a common accusation that success on
the business side of architecture comes with a selling of the soul.
“I’m giving high-level advice to very sophisticated clients,”
she says. “The bottom line is important, but unethical recommendations
aren’t even on the table. There are pluses and minuses, but
I have never had to recommend anything that I know is wrong. We
as architects have to put together a case, then speak the clients’
language and quantify our recommendations in terms they understand.
That’s the challenge. I give subjective recommendations supported
by objective data.”
And while she has no regrets, Lee still feels
a bit as if her career happened to her, rather than the other way
around. She has this advice for architecture students: “Know
your strengths, be mentally prepared, and check in with yourself
along your path. If I could go back, I would tell my earlier self
to explore different opportunities and be more aware of my career.
If I had, nothing might have changed, but I wouldn’t wonder
where life might have taken me.”
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- Undergraduate, Architecture