Palmyra PLLC

Milwaukee, United States

PALMYRA PLLC is a woman-owned full-service architecture practice based in Chicago. The practice, like its founder, is named after the city of Palmyra in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria, a city with an independent streak and an incredibly rich multicultural history. The archaeological site of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was partially destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Even in its ruinous state, Palmyra is a palimpsest. We believe that we are never creating in a vacuum and the name of our practice serves as a reminder of that. Architecture always starts with a problem: sometimes an eminently practical one and sometimes an abstract or conceptual one. In our practice we love solving all kinds of problems, but any formal or aesthetic merits a project achieves become meaningful only after the project has met or exceeded its purpose. Beyond the clinical joy of problem-solving there is also something deeply rewarding to the process of listening to the needs and desires of a client/end user and helping them realize their vision by infusing it with the spatial thinking, holistic planning, and technical expertise only an architect can provide. Architecture, after all, is a deeply humanistic endeavor, one that requires empathy, conviction, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge, the knowledge that comes with inhabiting a problem, internalizing its limitations, and making the judgment calls that ultimately lead to its solution. In our work we strive to adopt this exacting but empathic approach to design.