Kindra Welch ’99 found her calling as an architect while working on her Rice design studio project with Project Row Houses, a unique combination of art space and social service provider in Houston’s Third Ward. The undertaking—a series of row houses that were converted into art spaces—also included Welch’s own project, the Six-Square-House, which provides housing for single mothers.

• “That project was inspirational,” the Austin native says. It opened her eyes to the satisfactions of doing service-oriented architecture, and that process continued during her preceptorship with Michael Graves and Associates. While working with Graves, Welch audited two courses at Princeton University under architect/sociologist Robert Gutman that helped reaffirm her ambition to use architecture to serve the disadvantaged. That year, she also attended a lecture by Bryan Bell, the director of Design Corps, the branch of AmeriCorps that provides architecture and design services for the poor. Welch remembers Bell saying, “Architects serve 2 percent of the population. What about the other 98 percent?” Soon after graduating, she joined AmeriCorps.

• AmeriCorps assigned Welch to the Philadelphia area to help design and build housing for migrant farm workers. After finding out what her Design Corps work would entail, Welch went to Mexico to learn “what family space is like there.” She also picked up a little Spanish.

• The farm management for Welch’s current project not only wants to provide new quarters for the workers but also desires input from the workers themselves. The management also wants high-quality design that will last 75 or 100 years. “The workers were a little hesitant when a bilingual colleague and I approached them for suggestions,” Welch recalls. “They didn’t want to be seen as complainers.”

• After Welch and her co-worker convinced the migrants that they wouldn’t be making trouble, the design process began. “I introduced them to site plans, architectural symbols, and mapping. They made the site plans themselves, then I took their plans and made them into diagrams.” Once the various possibilities were drawn up, Welch presented the diagrams to the workers, who selected their favorite. “Using their input not only creates spaces more appropriate to their cultural preferences,” Welch notes, “but also validates them as individuals in a society that typically treats them as beasts of burden.”

• During the past year, Welch also has spent time at the Philadelphia Building Workshop at Pennsylvania State University working on urban projects. One of the projects she’s had a hand in is managing the construction of migrant worker housing near Gettysburg. The project’s modular homes are intended to demonstrate a new prototype for migrant housing.

• Welch credits the academic and social climate at Rice and the School of Architecture for opening her eyes to the possibility of service. She also remembers the School of Architecture as a place where professors “really believe in their students” and “let them pursue their own ideas.”

• Welch will be pursuing her own unique career path when her two-year tenure with AmeriCorps ends next July. Her long-range plans are flexible, but she wants to gain experience with sustainable construction technologies. “The best way to do that,” she explains, “is through hands-on practice. I think I’ll be working construction jobs for a time, doing manual labor.”