GWENDOLINE ALBRIGHT NDIKUMAGENGE

Portrait courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

Masters in Architecture, B.S. Arch & Certificate in Leadership from Andrews University School of Architecture | Architectural Designer at Heidi Hornaday, PC.

Gwendoline Albright N. is a recent graduate from Andrews University where she graduated with a M.Arch, B.Arch with honors, and a certificate in leadership. She is now working as an architectural designer at Heidi Hornaday, PC in New Buffalo, MI where she is able to gain architectural experience and exercise good stewardship of her degrees, gifts, skills, and talents in creating functional places that impact and inspire people to live better, healthier and happier. She is originally from Burundi and studied all her high school in Rwanda. She is a current associate member of the AIA and is actively pursuing licensure. In her college years, she served in many leadership positions and service projects locally and nationally through AIAS and was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi medal as the graduating student who showed an ability for leadership, performed willing service, and gives promise of real professional merit through her attitude and personality. Most of her work and volunteering involved initiating and implementing various community outreach projects, construction projects, and mentorship opportunities. Her everyday motivation and personal mission are to live a life of influence, impacting communities, and gradually change the world with a heart of service, stewardship, and ministering to others.

My aspirations as a future architect post-pandemic

What inspired you to pursue architecture?

I grew up with the desire to be a medical doctor because I wanted to be able to help people to live their best life healthier. However, after realizing that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in hospitals trying to help suffering people, I decided that I would go with being involved in people’s’ lives in a different way. After noticing how environments shape and impact people’s way of living, I decided that the best way to cure a disease is to prevent it. Hence, I decided to pursue architecture because it was a career that I believed would enable me to create and intentionally design places that have the power to change people and communities for the better, inspiring them to live a better, healthier life, while living up to their best potential.

Research project on campus through charette. Photo courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

What is the most important thing that you learned in the past year?

The most important thing that I learned in this past year is that the impact one makes on people will always be more powerful than the intention they did it with. In addition to reaching the understanding that “one doesn’t know what they don’t know until they do”, I realized the true meaning of the saying “Every action has an equal but opposite reaction”. 2020 helped clarify that good intentions don’t always bring good results but that it always helps when you do it keeping in mind that you are going to be accountable to someone at the end of the day.

Sketching in nature . Photo credit Prof. Troy Homenchuk. Photo Courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

Community outreach project. Photo Courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

What are some architectural organizations (or specific person/role model) that helped you learn to overcome an obstacle? How did they?

One of the most significant obstacles that I now consider an accomplishment was to conduct a research in both my home country (entitled: “Strengthening social bonds in Bujumbura through public space: Redesigning Jardin Public de Bujumbura for the restoration of the city’s sense of community.” and one on the campus (entitled Indoor-outdoor café) during my senior year. Both of these projects were assessing the way in which intentional urban spaces design can help heal, inspire, and promote better lives in communities. Both my advisors at the time: Professor Andrew Von Maur and Prof. Mark Moreno through sharing resources, guidance, and encouragement helped me overcome the obstacles that these projects brought up as a multicultural perspective was incorporated to truly find the possibilities for utilizing public places to bring change in people’s lives and communities.

Research thesis project in Bujumbura - Courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

Charrette outcome. Photo Courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

If you were given the opportunity to repeat the year, what is one thing you’d do differently?

If I had the opportunity to repeat this year, the one thing I would have done differently would be to not jump to conclusions, wasting time dreaming of “what could have been” but instead take every circumstance as a learning opportunity. I wish I spent less time mourning everything that I lost, but rather invest more time in what I could gain from it. As a COVID19 graduate, I wish I understood and was ready to accept that life and careers are journeys that can be lived and enjoyed regardless of how they start, the turns they take, and how blur the destination might be. If I had to repeat this year, I would be committed to a life filled with learning, experimentation, exploration, and implementation despite the circumstances.

Community Outreach project. Photo Courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

As you reflect on the past year, what did you discover as your biggest strengths?

During this time of uncertainty and chaos, I discovered that my biggest strengths revolved around my ambition of solving problems by researching, asking questions, and trying to get to the root of the problem and working to influence others to create change, trying to bring the best out of any circumstance.

Mission trip in Swaziland. Credit to Prof. Troy Homenchuk. Photo Courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge

In terms of rising concerns and problems (in the architectural profession) over the past year, what is one change that you wished would happen and it did not? This can be in an educational or work atmosphere. 

Through the racial and political tensions, the instability, and the world crisis experienced this year alone, I believe that the rising concern and problem in the profession and the realization of the architecture profession need for change by recognizing that the impact of the profession is much greater than the object of it. As an aspiring architect, my hope is that the rising generation of professionals would realize the potential of architecture to be the vehicle for the world’s need for change and be intentional in their endeavors aiming to achieve the best through true stewardship from individuals’ experience, education, and careers; a gift for which we are all accounted for.

Assessing stewardship in architecture. Photo Courtesy of Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge