When confronted with a design or management problem, Barbara Mullenex reaches for the same tool every time: a lined Leuchtturm notebook.

“Sketching and drawing helps bring out my ideas and helps communicate ideas to other people,” says Mullenex, a managing principal at design firm Perkins Eastman in Washington, D.C. “It’s an effective way to work through design problems—and everything from a table setting for a dinner party to an organizational chart for the office to organizing our summer intern program.”

The last item is particularly close to Mullenex’s heart after many years of guiding, mentoring and collaborating with younger associates.

“我实际上喜欢人们，”她准备好笑着说。“如果我在帮助您或炸薯条之间有选择，我会为您提供帮助。我真的，真的，真的很喜欢炸薯条。”

Mullenex, 64, sees herself as a “connector,” eager to link up her contacts all over the world. She’s a great believer in networking as the best way to produce an architect’s lifeblood: new work. A crucial step for young designers, she says, is to join organizations they believe in and that will help their future success.

Mullenex herself serves on the Federal City Council and is a member of the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., and the International Women’s Forum. She has served on the board of the National Symphony Orchestra and is currently vice chair of the Maryland Youth Ballet Board.

为她贡献的管理和指导, as well as her exceptional designs, ENR MidAtlantic is honoring Mullenex as its 2020 Legacy Award winner. She has led the design and management of several high-profile projects for clients such as Marriott, Global Holdings and the World Bank. Before joining Perkins Eastman in 2013, Mullenex owned her own design firm, OPX, for 26 years.

“我是每个人的导师，”穆莱纳克斯说。“每次我在办公室或发送电子邮件和Zoom时，我都会在各个级别上指导我周围的人的价值观和诚信。官方导师和受训者的标签可能会变得有些僵硬，有点臭。”

In fact, she has only one official mentee, who lives in New York and calls Mullenex four to five times a year about projects. “I tend to fall too far on the solution side, not the listening,” Mullenex says. “I tell myself, ‘Keep listening before you solve their problem.’”

Karen Gioconda, a senior associate at Perkins Eastman, began working with Mullenex on a Hilton hotel redesign in 2007. Gioconda had joined OPX looking for female leadership and followed Mullenex to Perkins Eastman in 2013. The two have also collaborated on numerous volunteer events.

“Barbara’s very honest and forthcoming, but never in a cruel way,” Gioconda says. “She tries to see the best in everybody else and plays toward their strengths. Even if you aren’t the strongest at construction documents you might be the strongest at coordinating consultants.”

Gioconda回忆起她在过去一年中遇到的艰难时期，影响了她的生产力和专业关系。“芭芭拉告诉我，‘我已经支持你，我总是会支持你，但是你必须把你的行为融为一体，对吗？’”乔科达（Gioconda）赞扬了穆莱内克斯（Mullenex）的诚实反馈，以帮助她的工作再次发挥自己的潜力。

在大流行前的办公室里，穆莱纳克斯（Mullenex）经常出现，解决问题并与团队进行检查，经常手持笔。Gioconda说：“她仍然手素描，因此她通常参与了预先设计的工作或早期设计工作。”“她会在一张大桌子上推出一些痕迹，并做所有的素描，然后再进行工作，然后将其交给某人。”

Peter Cavaluzzi, a Perkins Eastman principal and board director, met Mullenex while trying to win a commission to design a Brooklyn building for Tishman Speyer. The firm was eager to show off its creativity and knowledge to an important new client.

Mullenex worked with the firm’s young staff to demonstrate the team’s experience and creativity, Cavaluzzi says. “Her wide-ranging knowledge of design and building combined with her warm and joyous persona helped our team to make a strong impression. She helped us to have the confidence to show them that we had what it takes to compete on the main stage.”

She also worked on the construction of Perkins Eastman’s offices in D.C. “She really had to leverage her team to keep the project in the budget,” says Linda Rabbitt, founder and chairman of Rand Construction Corp. “Barbara led each preconstruction meeting with extreme clarity around the pricing goals and negotiated her design team’s desires with respect to the cost of the work. At one point in the job she wrote to us, ‘I know we are crazy, but in spite of that, your team is doing a fantastic job.’”

Career by Design

A native of Harrisonburg, Va., and the daughter of a mathematics professor, Mullenex had always been interested in math and science. In high school she had the opportunity to shadow a local architect. “He told me that he had only met one woman architect and that he would not call her a lady,” Mullenex says. “That might have sealed the deal for me!”

She went on to earn a degree in architecture at University of Maryland, College Park, but her thesis review was not a complete success. Mullenex never knew why until she ran into an old thesis adviser two years ago. “He told me, ‘You were doing affordable housing, and that wasn’t what architects did then. You were supposed to do an art museum or something. You were just too frightening, too scary.’”

然而，穆莱纳克斯（Mullenex）设计自己的未来的决心从未阻止她。她继续在1990年代后期在华盛顿特区经营自己的公司OPX，OPX是由Moshe Safdie，Moshe Safdie，Safdie，New Blun，烟草，枪支，枪支和炸药总部的新型建筑师和内部建筑师的副建筑师和室内建筑师。这是1995年俄克拉荷马城轰炸后建造的第一座联邦办公大楼。

“你想建立一个建筑…,并t look like a penitentiary,” Mullenex says. “It had to be an impressive building, it had to show it could follow all the federal security measures to keep our public servants safe, and in 20 years it had to fit a transformed neighborhood.” Construction began right before 9/11 in 2001 and the new Ariel Rios Federal Building helped to revitalize the city’s formerly desolate NoMa (North of Massachusetts Avenue) district.

尽管OPX取得了成功，但Mullenex一直对在一家大公司工作感到好奇。2013年，她与道格·史密斯（Doug Smith）共进午餐，道格·史密斯（Doug Smith）的公司与珀金斯·伊士曼（Perkins Eastman）合并，史密斯（Smith）询问OPX是否也想这样做。渴望帮助领导更大的，更高影响的项目，其才能在全国范围内开展更多的才能，Mullen18luck官网ex于2013年脱颖而出，独自向珀金斯·伊士曼（Perkins Eastman）脱颖而出，因为她在OPX的合作伙伴对合并不感兴趣。

Mullenex joined Perkins Eastman as a studio leader and set to work designing a new city in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Aramco’s Ajyal Community of Excellence, a 4.2-square-mile community, included residential buildings, schools, three types of mosques and office buildings, for a total of 8,500 units. “It was a scale I had never worked at before— the pace was incredible, the project types complex,” Mullenex says.

Currently Mullenex is working on the World Bank office compound in Kampala, Uganda. The complex project aims to represent Uganda’s culture as well as provide appropriate security and meet sustainability and post-COVID-19 workplace goals.

“My career has spanned some incredible changes in our profession—from hand drawings to VR technology, the impact of climate change and the impact of sustainability on the built environment,” Mullenex says.

人为因素

One of the highest-impact projects Mullenex has been involved in was Washington D.C.’s Wharf waterfront project, a mile-long stretch along the Washington Channel. The first phase of the project won an Urban Land Institute Award for Excellence in 2019.

Mullenex points to the transformed waterfront as an example of how people will embrace a space in surprising ways. The Wharf has no curbs or gutters, and the cars, bikes and pedestrians use the same streetway, with all this movement controlled by design. But there’s also a cast-iron drainage channel 8 in. wide that extends the length of the Wharf.

“And who uses that?” Mullenex asks. “It’s those guys on electric scooters. And we were very intentional about trying to slow down bike riders and cars by making everything very bumpy, but here’s this little narrow way, and all those little scooters are zooming down there.”

Mullenex试图永远不会忘记设计中的人为因素。在她的职业生涯的早期，她努力为生病的孩子设计一个大厅。Mullenex作为她的研究的一部分检查了类似的设施，并注意到了一些令人惊讶的细节。“我会看到人们和小孩一起进来，他们会和他们的姐姐，姐姐的两个孩子，婆婆在一起，他们会打包。孩子们很挑剔，父母不知道如何停车。”

然后她得知该设施的设计师想要一个六层楼高的六层楼，顶部有天窗。“我想，‘您知道成为这个孩子的母亲，进来让您的孩子尖叫，到处引起共鸣是什么样的感觉？’您想要一个隐藏的地方。”

这种经历增强了穆莱纳克斯自己的建筑方法。她说：“我更感兴趣地挖掘人们的经验，而不是我想为自己的教育创建的建筑。”“让人们走进一个空间说，‘我喜欢这里。我不知道为什么，但是我喜欢这里确实有意义。”