People

Emilia Baker, AIA

Emilia seeks to impact people and enliven communities through design at any scale. Emilia graduated with a BArch from Virginia Tech and brings a diverse professional background, including hospitality, multi-family, commercial, K-12 and higher education projects. An organizational unicorn, Emilia enjoys a hands-on approach to beautifully resolving the most complex design problems. One of Emilia's most meaningful contributions early in her career was being on the design team for the new Sandy Hook School, where she learned the power of community in the design process. These experiences have helped Emilia become a natural collaborator and a passionate maker, seeking holistic design solutions and championing a concept-based approach to design. Emilia attributes her passion for food, art and culture to her early childhood growing up in Central America. In her free time, you can find Emilia creating elaborate crafts, hosting backyard barbecues, and planning adventures with her partner and their cat, Klaus.

Celia Poirier

Celia is a graphic designer living and working in New Haven, CT. She believes in the power of design to better people’s lives and stir social change. Her senior thesis at the University of Connecticut explored the role of design in shifting a town’s perceptions of its syringe-exchange program, a service long condemned by town leaders and residents. She worked to develop a new identity focused on the program’s vital, positive role in community health. Funding from a national grant allowed the project to fully materialize.

Celia’s desire for simplicity and purpose guide her as a designer and a human. When not at work, she can be found in a public library, on a yoga mat, in the woods, or on a run. One day she hopes to design a mobile cabin and live off the grid.

Hüma Sahin

Hüma is a designer interested in exploring the dialectic surrounding home and transience. Home, because she believes it is the crystallized reflection of society, transience because she believes human agency lies in change.

She received her Master in Architecture Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was awarded the Department of Architecture Faculty Design Award. Before that, she received dual Bachelor’s Degrees in Architecture and in Urban and Regional Planning at Istanbul Technical University. For both degrees she received the Faculty Prize for two separate theses. Prior to moving to San Francisco she worked in a diverse set of design and architecture offices in Istanbul, Boston and New York.

Keith Appleby, RA

Keith is a passionate designer of spaces, objects, and graphics. A summer spent traveling through Scandinavia introduced him to the threads that link regional architecture, landscapes, and everything in between. This experience led Keith to become a student of his environment; he strives to ensure that design is informed by past approaches as much as it is rooted in the present. He believes that the best results stem from a strong collaborative ethic, and loves working closely with our clients to distill their aspirations into nuanced architecture.

Keith graduated from the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and returned to his Connecticut roots in 2012, where he has designed laboratories, classrooms, offices, and artist studios for public and private clients. In his spare time, he designs product packaging and recipes for his cocktail bitters business.

Keith is a licensed architect in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Alex Thompson, RA

As a designer, Alex finds the most meaning in work that engages with community needs, wants, and dreams. She has had the opportunity to work on such projects around North America, including a public library renovation, multi-unit accessible housing, and several pioneering mass timber projects for public and private groups. As a New Haven County native, she is excited to be doing this work in the community that she considers home.

A licensed architect in Connecticut, Alex received a Master of Architecture and BA from Yale University.  Before ACT, Alex worked at Herzog & de Meuron’s New York City office and Michael Green Architecture in Vancouver, Canada.

In her free time, Alex loves running, which complements her other main hobby, chasing after her three young children!

Huê Bùi

Huê is a maker from Hanoi. She works across sculpture, installation, painting, horticulture, carpentry, and design. As a designer, Huê’s sensibility is guided by specificity, using detail to articulate narratives while highlighting craftsmanship and beauty of materials. Her work, then, aspires toward gesamtkunstwerk, exploring how ideas are thoughtfully carried across scales and disciplines to constitute a whole that’s rich and nuanced. In a globalized world, she finds roots in understanding the land, drawing from Indigenous wisdom to explore ways of living and building through the language of care.

Huê holds a Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley, where she received the Eikelman Allen Fellowship and the Design Process Award. She also earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from NYU and was awarded the Department of Art Student Excellence Award. In 2025, Huê was named one of Interior Design Magazine’s Top 30 Under 30 in San Francisco.