Carrie Meinberg Burke on curiosity, biomimicry, and design synthesis

Design the Future

Carrie Meinberg Burke is an architect, designer, artist, and inventor whose work is infused with research into light, ecology, health, human sensory perception, and biomimicry. She runs Parabola Architecture with her husband, Kevin Burke. They work at all scales, and one recent workplace project was described, by its Google owners, as “a building with a soul.” Carrie is co-developing an innovative heating and cooling unit that applies biomimicry principles to optimize form for thermal comfort and energy efficiency.

Carrie is a believer that you have to design the design process itself, in order to give any project the space and time for analysis-synthesis resonance. The home that she designed for her family in Charlottesville, Virginia -- Timepiece -- is a manifestation of her work in grad school exploring the tension between structure and light. “I did not actually draw or conjure the roof form,” Carrie says. “It is a mapping of natural forces.” The entire process was transformative, she says: “The ability to take a theoretical idea and not only build it but live in it has been the greatest learning experience. It has deeply informed my point of view about nature and our place in it.”