 |
Hometown: Two Harbors
 High School: Two Harbors H.S. College: Iowa State University (master's) Field of Study: Architecture |
|
click on photos to enlarge |
Keihly Moore, a 2004 graduate of Two Harbors High School, where she was a stand out student, is now studying architecture at Iowa State University. She has been interested in the environment since childhood. It was only natural. For many years she lived only a few blocks from Lake Superior and her mother worked for the Department of Natural Resources.
She has translated her interest into studying sustainable architecture, striving to bring about a change in design philosophy and about the intrinsic power of buildings along the way.
Keihly believes strongly that design should be affordable and accessible to everyone.
She has already taken steps to remedy the problem of accessibility and affordability in architecture during her time in Iowa State’s five-year masters program. As a member of Freedom by Design, a part of the American Institute of Architecture Students, Keihly and others from Iowa State worked in Ames, Iowa, to plan more accessible housing for people with disabilities.
Immersing herself more fully into civil planning as a science, Keihly worked with two other students and four architects to revitalize Oakland, Iowa’s Main Street. She felt revitalized herself working on the project for the feeling she got inside from being able to work with people who truly cared about the work that was being done with young minds and new ideas.
“We aren’t very aware or perceptive of our environment,” she says. “Technology makes it so that we don’t have to be.”
“Buildings are about power,” Keihly says. When it comes to transforming the authoritarian and outdated structures of architecture, Keihly says, “If you can’t beat them, join them. And change them from the inside out.”
She believes that creativity with materials will give us better options, which can have a major pay-off in the end.
She’s done just that in developing her career path. During a recent trip to China, Keihly saw how offices in that country were adapting to their surroundings and using less than the 50 percent of energy American office buildings consume. The rooftops on the office buildings in China, for example, are covered with energy sustaining solar panels and water heaters. Even the street lights store energy while the sun is shining.
Keihly’s growing knowledge about sustainability has motivated her to be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to the energy crises we face today due to poor stewardship of planetary resources. These realizations have been coupled to her career philosophy..
“We aren’t very aware or perceptive of our environment,” she says. “Technology makes it so that we don’t have to be.”
Keihly has demonstrated her growing passion for sustainability by applying principles to her own life; for example, taking wood discarded from school projects to build a bookshelf and building a chair out of 74 percent recycled materials in a school competition.
Keihly’s multidisciplinary approach is accented in the classes she has taken at Iowa State. She believes that architecture encompasses just about all those disciplines she has come to learn, study, and implement in all the activities and projects of which she has been a part.
Increased attention to the environment is what Keihly is trying to implement through her studies. Creating a sustainable and accessible philosophy in the science of civil planning and architecture, she has her eye on the future and is determined to make her mark.