About Rachelle:
Rachelle joined Utile in 2021 as an Architect & Project Manager, bringing with her a decade of experience in a variety of project types and scales. Rachelle thrives on complex projects that navigate regulatory processes, client needs, and budget while upholding design excellence. Her experience includes new construction, adaptive reuse, planning, programming, and feasibility studies. She currently is managing a range of affordable, highly sustainable, multifamily housing projects, as well as the repositioning of a Boston-area strip mall to a mixed-use urban neighborhood.
Prior to Utile, Rachelle worked at several Boston-based architecture firms including Safdie Architects and Bruner/Cott where she worked on civic and institutional projects. At Bruner/Cott, she was the project architect for the Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine, a major community and cultural anchor for the redevelopment of Thompson’s Point in Portland, Maine. She was also the project architect for the Yale Divinity Regenerative Village, a multi-use graduate living development with 155 units on a 19-acre site targeting Living Building Certification.
A recipient of the 2024 AIA Young Architects Award, Rachelle is driven by her belief in the power of collective action to spur systemic change. Rachelle has devoted considerable time and energy to shaping professional communities and conversations focused on reducing embodied carbon. She has been a co-chair for the Boston Society of Architects & Carbon Leadership Forum Hub since December 2020. Through her leadership, the hub has become a thriving community of volunteers dedicated to uncovering new pathways to reduce embodied carbon through summits, advocacy efforts, and other initiatives. She also directed three years of the chapter’s Women-in-Design Symposium events, using them as a platform for interdisciplinary discourse on ways to increase social equity in the built environment.
Rachelle holds an M.Arch from Harvard GSD and Bachelor of Arts from Williams College. She is a certified practitioner for the Passive House Institute US and the International Well Building Institute. Rachelle lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children. She is conversant in Egyptian Arabic. She enjoys hiking, cooking, and continuing her Arabic learning.
