Translating Place: What Migration Taught Me About Architecture
Cities do more than shape buildings. They shape the questions architects ask, the assumptions they challenge, and ultimately the places they create.
When people refer to migration, they often think of movement between places, whether across countries or between rural and urban communities. As architects, however, migration can also become movement between ideas. My journey from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Miami, Boston, and New York in the United States exposed me to different urban cultures, design traditions, and ways of understanding the built environment. Each place reflects its own assumptions about how communities live, how infrastructure performs, and how design creates value.
Experiencing these differences has convinced me that one of architecture's greatest responsibilities is not to transfer design solutions across borders, but to translate them. This perspective has become increasingly important as architectural practice grows more interconnected. Ideas now move across continents faster than ever, yet their success still depends on local environmental conditions, governance structures, cultural values, and community needs and priorities. The challenge is no longer simply accessing global knowledge, but learning how to apply it responsibly.
For me, this process begins with migration, but it does not end there. Moving between places creates opportunities to observe unfamiliar environments and better understand the cultural, historical, environmental, and institutional forces that shape them. Those observations can then be translated into design principles that respond to the particular needs, aspirations, and potential of each place.
I have come to understand this translational approach through four interconnected lenses: context, systems, community, and adaptation. Context asks what environmental, cultural, historical, and political conditions shape an idea. Systems examine how that idea connects to infrastructure, ecology, mobility, finance, and governance. Community centers the people who benefit, participate, and contribute local knowledge. Adaptation considers what must change for an idea to succeed in a new setting. Together, these lenses make translation a continuous process of learning, interpreting, and adjusting rather than replicating precedent.
In practice, this approach encourages architects to move beyond asking whether a project was successful and instead examine why it succeeded. By identifying the conditions that enabled a solution, designers can adapt its underlying principles to new contexts while respecting the environmental, cultural, and institutional differences that make every place unique. Rather than asking whether a successful project can be replicated elsewhere, architects should ask a different question: What principle made this solution successful, and how should that principle change in a different context?
Replication seeks to reproduce outcomes. Translation seeks to understand the principles that produced them.
This distinction matters because the challenges architects face today are increasingly shared, while the conditions in which they occur are not. Climate adaptation, housing affordability, aging infrastructure, rapid urbanization, and public health affect cities around the world, yet no two places experience them in exactly the same way. The most valuable architectural ideas are therefore not those that remain fixed, but those that can evolve without losing their purpose.
Each city I have lived in revealed a different dimension of this translational approach. Addis Ababa taught me about community adaptability and local knowledge; Miami made climate resilience an unavoidable design consideration; Boston demonstrated the importance of interconnected systems; and New York reinforced the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. Together, these experiences illustrate how architectural thinking can evolve through multiple contexts rather than being shaped by a single place.
Growing up in Addis Ababa revealed to me how communities often respond to limited resources with remarkable adaptability. Solutions emerge incrementally, shaped by local knowledge, social networks, and necessity. These conditions remind us that resilience is not always the product of advanced technology. It is often embedded in people and the relationships they build.
Miami presents a different reality. There, climate risk is impossible to separate from urban development. Rising seas, hurricanes, and coastal growth demand that resilience become part of everyday planning rather than an isolated sustainability initiative. Design decisions carry environmental consequences that extend well beyond the site itself.
In Boston, my academic and research experiences demonstrated that architecture does not operate independently of policy, finance, ecology, or governance. Questions surrounding water resilience, infrastructure, and housing revealed that meaningful design increasingly depends on understanding interconnected systems rather than individual buildings.
Professional practice in New York has reinforced another lesson. Delivering complex projects requires architects to translate ideas between clients, engineers, consultants, fabricators, and communities. Design is no longer simply the act of creating form. It is the ability to build shared understanding across disciplines while maintaining a clear vision.
These experiences have reshaped how I approach architecture. Every project begins with context, but it should never end there. Architects have a responsibility to learn from places beyond their academic schooling or industry drivers and learn to become deeply responsive to the places and people they are surrounded by. Innovation is rarely created by copying what has already been built. It emerges through careful observation, critical interpretation, and thoughtful adaptation.
As our profession responds to an increasingly interconnected world, technical expertise alone will not be enough. Architects must also become translators, capable of moving ideas across environmental, cultural, and institutional boundaries without losing sight of the people those ideas are intended to serve.
In that sense, translating place is not simply a consequence of migration. It is an architectural responsibility, one that transforms movement between places into more thoughtful, resilient, and context-responsive design.
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