As part of our ongoing series of short videos, entitled Conversations with Ennead, we are pleased to feature three of Ennead’s Principals: Felicia Berger, Grace Chen, and Melissa Sarko.
Felicia serves as a project manager for many of Ennead’s projects and believes that architecture has the fundament ability to change the human experience and in a “Conversation with Felicia”, she said, “oftentimes we are designing for clients who want to fit a program into an envelope, but in doing so, we create something that is greater than the sum of its parts: we create places for ideas to emerge, for people to congregate, and for communities to feel supported. When we deliver a product, we provide something that checks the boxes for what a client might have been looking for, but also something that checks the boxes for things that they never knew were even possible, and in doing so, we create spaces, places, and buildings that support our clients’ goals and aspirations today and well into the future.”
Grace leads the international practice for the firm, working between Ennead’s New York and Shanghai offices. In “A conversation with Grace”, she discusses setting up Ennead’s Shanghai office seven years ago and how Ennead was able to extend the family-like collaborative office culture from the New York office to the new Shanghai office. In the conversation, Grace recalls “since setting up the Shanghai office, we have really accomplished a lot between the New York and Shanghai teams. We have designed, more than 1.5 million square meters of buildings in China and we have completed more than 50 projects. Beyond the size and the scale, we are really proud of the quality of the projects that we have delivered.”
In “A conversation with Melissa” she discusses her experience at Ennead and the value of Ennead’s diverse range of work noting, “one of the best things about Ennead is that there’s a variety of project typologies that you could be working on at any given time. Having access to different project types allows you to really understand the way that different buildings function, and sometimes it is really great to cross-pollinate that information across different project types so that there is constantly a shared knowledge that’s going back and forth.”