Nate Rogers

July 29, 2016
nate_rogers

Nate Rogers graduated from Harvard College in 2005 with a degree in History of Art and Architecture, cum laude with high honors. While it had been his goal from an early age to become an architect, a roundabout path to the profession led to him to the upper floors of Sackler and the seminar rooms of the Fogg. After college, it took him further afield to the Eastern Seaboard, where he worked for a year as the second mate on the large traditional schooner, Virginia, conducting youth sail training on the Atlantic among a professional crew of twelve. Once acclimated to the privations of living at sea, Nate felt ready to tackle graduate school and the ascetic life of design studio. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 with combined degrees in architecture (M. Arch I) and historic preservation (M. Sci.), and was the AIA Henry Adams Medal winner and Faculty Prize winner of his year. He has spent the past three years as a designer at Beyer Blinder Belle, an architecture, planning, and preservation practice in New York, working on a range of cultural and institutional projects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to a new research university in Africa. His current challenge, aside from licensure exams, is Harvard House Renewal; Nate is a designer on the Winthrop House renovation.

Nate writes: “I owe HAA a particular debt of gratitude for two things. The first is that I would never have developed an interest in historic preservation and its role in design without the extraordinary foundation in architectural history that I gained in my HAA studies. The second is that HAA taught me how to approach issues of aesthetics and design from an analytic perspective while helping me gain the skill and confidence to articulate and structure an argument in academic writing. While the first item may be specific to my career interest in combining preservation with new design, the value of the second is universal. A concentration in HAA offers the quintessential liberal arts degree in the best sense.

Finally, as a thesis-track student-athlete who also spent many waking hours at the Newell boathouse as a lightweight rower over my four years at Harvard, I can report that with a little discipline you can do both!”