Chelsea Rowe, 34

Growing up, Chelsea Rowe said she had two dreams: to be an architect during the school year and an archaeologist in the summer. Over the years, she came to realize the two fields are deeply connected.

Rowe incorporates those two dreams into her work at TPG Architecture. She takes an existing or historical office building and designs it to fit the needs and identity of its current tenants.

She is doing that at Vornado Realty Trust’s Penn 2, where she’s helping to build out two new floors — or 80,000 square feet — for stakeholder strategy firm FGS Global’s new offices. She’s also working on a new office for law firm Herrick Feinstein at 2 Park Avenue, in addition to several other confidential projects in Manhattan.

But designing offices in the sports world — specifically “transformative headquarters projects” for clients looking for a “new form of identity” — has seemed to become Rowe’s niche. Her TPG team, made up of up to 15 designers, led the design of the National Hockey League’s 175,000-square-foot headquarters at One Manhattan West, as well as Major League Soccer’s new 126,000-square-foot HQ at Penn 2.

“Those were some of the most challenging but rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on,” Rowe said. “These are long-established leagues, and doing right by that felt like a massive undertaking. It required us to really dig deep on solutions that felt authentic but not cheesy, innovative but not too abstract. It was a massive team effort along the way, but probably one of the most rewarding.”

As for future projects, Rowe said she’s looking forward to doing more of what she’s already doing: building up her team and taking on bigger challenges with clients who are looking for an architect to “provide unique solutions and craft an identity” alongside them.

The work also comes easy for Rowe, who has been at TPG since starting as an intern in 2014 (apart from a short two-year stint at a different firm). “This is just how my brain works,” she said.