Laurie Kamper, AIA, LEED Green Associate
Principal
Laurie pulled all the keys off her childhood bassoon, just to see how it worked. A beautiful sound comes from a human and instrument together and, for her, knowing the mechanics of the sound was as important as knowing the message and emotion. How things work, how elements combine to form a whole greater than its parts, is her fascination, so music and architecture became a natural combination.
Her studies took her to Dartmouth College for a French degree, orchestral performance, and an emphasis on math and computer science along the way. While there, she performed as a bassoon soloist with the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra and Symphonic Wind Ensemble, picking up numerous citations of merit and culminating in her senior recital. Pursuing music for several years after college, she performed first in Boston, then in Portland, where her French degree led to a useful digression into translation and support, then network design in the IT world.
Architecture ultimately came to the fore, bringing her to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she received a Master of Architecture with honors in 2005. A summer internship introduced her to architectural acoustics, where she was finally able to marry her pursuits of music and architecture, making her way to Threshold as our very first employee in 2006. In that fascination with the parts as well as the whole, her knowledge offered up with a sparkling laugh, she serves the buildings as well as the music.
Recent Projects