Michael Kmak, AIA, LEED AP
Something in my brain has hardwired a never-ending interest in how we shape our world. Constantly thinking about and analyzing the forms and systems that make our lives move. I feel an awesome responsibility to create and design a better future for and with all of us. I feel privileged to be able to work with really great partners in shaping the world to come.
Michael draws inspiration from the urban environment. He focuses on the patterns and complexities of daily life intersected with patterns and complexities of the urban condition, which he believes create new formulas that we can use to design our future. To this end, Michael has researched new intersections, ecologies, and design systems while living and working in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. He has followed a career he views as a perpetual crash-course in real-world design solutions meeting big ideas and is persistently thinking about how design can positively change our social and cultural environments for an equitable and diverse future.
Over the course of the last 15 years, his passion for design has led his projects to win over 15 AIA Design Awards alone. Most recently, he has received the Daniel Burnham Honor Award for Master Planning from the AIA Illinois for his work on the Planned Agricultural District (PAD) project. He has received numerous chapter awards for design excellence and is regularly a guest design critic at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
