A high school design brief asks a simple question with huge consequences: what would you build if an extinct animal could come back, and people needed a place to study it, care for it, and learn from it? We sit down with Grace to unpack how she takes that Architecture Week challenge and turns it into a research and rehabilitation centre concept that feels bold, organic, and surprisingly practical. From the start, she’s thinking about more than a cool form she’s thinking about how a visitor arrives, what they see first, and how the building’s key spaces connect.

Grace shares her journey from an arts background into student architecture, including AP Art portfolio work and the moment she realises architecture is a way to turn pen-and-paper creativity into spaces people can actually use. We talk Revit, curved geometry, façade decisions, and the reality of the design process: you don’t “get it right”, you iterate. She explains rebuilding major areas again and again, learning how scale and proportion can drift, and discovering that determination matters as much as talent.

The conversation also gets into the technical and ethical side of design: accessibility, lifts, stairs, awkward angles, and making a beautiful building function for everyone. Grace compares walkable, detail-rich European architecture especially her time in Portugal with more car-first places in the US, and makes the case that buildings shape mood, community life, and how we feel day to day. If you care about architecture, design thinking, or how to start as a young designer, you’ll leave with concrete lessons and a lot of motivation.
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