Q&A with Architectural Laboratory Designer Nolan Vinson Dalman
You graduated in the fall of 2019 and your first architectural job was focused on healthcare design. How did Covid impact that market and the work you were doing? Did Covid impact what sort of architectural projects you wanted to work on?
In college every semester I was not in school I had internships. One in Chicago with an interior design firm. One in Oregon with a hospitality firm. One in New York with a healthcare design firm. I fell in love with healthcare design, which had always been somewhat prevalent in my life because almost everyone in my family is in healthcare. All of my family from the Philippines who came over to the US are nurses, doctors or physical therapists. So I was very in tune with healthcare, having spent so much of my childhood going to aunts and uncles’ work after school or my mom’s physical therapy job after school. I was familiar with healthcare spaces, and that really made it easy for me to go into healthcare design.
At my first job I started working on a bunch of projects from emergency departments, medical center renovations and hospitals. The pandemic hit 2-3 months later and we had to revamp a bunch of that work. It was extremely fast paced. Working on redesigning hospitals, redesigning emergency departments, and then new health centers that popped up around the city. Doing this work gave me a really good sense of the importance of spaces designed for a specific use. I could see the impact and how these spaces are tools for people to accomplish their healthcare service.
You stepped away from architecture to earn your real estate license. Tell me about that career move.
The primary driver was burnout. The breakneck pace required for healthcare projects during Covid had taken a toll on me. I had fallen out of love with architecture at the time because of the effort. I saw a tangential path connecting my love of the built environment and spaces in real estate. And it turns out it was relatively easy to study and take the real estate licensing exams.
What did you learn from real estate that you have applied to architecture?
To me real estate is similar to architecture in the sense that you have a client and you assess their needs for a space. Rather than designing it, you find it for them. I would help them see how certain spaces can fit their needs or help them find the proper compromises for their needs and their budget. In a city like New York, there are millions of apartments and options, so it’s essentially matching someone’s budget with what truly satisfies their needs and wants. Serving clients in real estate and lab planning are not that different. They’re all just people at the end of the day and we’re trying to understand them and how they navigate through space.
You work on a large variety of projects at HERA, including clinical labs. How is that work related to the healthcare design you did previously?
Medical planning and lab planning are very similar in the way that you conceptualize and plan out spaces broadly and then get into the details and design the individual spaces. What drew me to HERA specifically was that I really wanted to be able to focus on those details. Sometimes architecture is broad strokes, painting generalizations for people. But when you get into really niche things like lab design you get into the head of individual users. That always interested me more than just a general fascination with buildings. Part of that comes from growing up around healthcare professionals. I feel like my Filipino culture taught me service to individuals as a love language.
What are you working on now that you’re really excited about or proud of?
The Pennsylvania Joint Laboratory Facility has been challenging and quite an undertaking in general because it has multiple departments with different people doing different sciences within the same building. We really had to dive into what each one of them did. I’ve really enjoyed that project because of the variety of laboratories within a single project, and we still had to dive into each one to the same level of magnification. It’s this massive puzzle where you have to understand all the things about each of the individual departments and fold them in together.