Alfia White.
Alfia White, 28
Associate at Cooper Robertson
Architecture has always been a tool for storytelling for Alfia White. Growing up in Philadelphia, her dad built movie sets, and before she graduated with a master’s in architecture from Tulane in 2015, she interned at an architecture firm in her hometown that restored a Colonial revival home. White spent hours painstakingly documenting the stone structure’s history.
It follows that she would join Cooper Robertson, a firm that specializes in cultural spaces and museums with narrative focus. As she was graduating, the firm had just finished the redesign of the Whitney Museum. White has made such institutions — and the intricate, behind-the-scenes work that makes them so transportive — her focus. Her previous work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts found her team analyzing and improving the way the building operated and flowed, from public spaces to the storage and operational corridors.
She’s currently engrossed in the construction of the Studio Museum in Harlem, a David Adjaye-designed showcase for the work of artists of African descent, set to open in 2022. White is helping translate Adjaye’s vision for the site on 125th Street and bring it to life, including the intricate, winding, public galleries and street-facing showcases that bring programming to the passersby. After this eye-opening experience with the complexity of the Studio Museum, the challenges in BIM coordination and the logistics of juggling different teams of contractors, White wants to focus on other sustainably-minded public spaces.
“I learned that buildings like this are one entire system,” she said. “We’re pushing what we can do here to achieve a level of craft and a seamless appearance for the public.”
