Archistrati was founded by Amanda Roelle to provide architecture, sustainability, and educational services to community organizations, businesses, and individuals. Amanda is a licensed architect and LEED AP, BD+C*. She uses her strong intercultural communication skills, professional architecture and community development experience, organizational management abilities and inherent creativity to empower individuals and communities to create sustainable environments.
In 2012 Amanda left her life restoring historic masonry high-rises in Chicago, relocated to Italy, and created her current project, A Spasso Con Un Architetto / Out With An Architect, an architectural educational initiative where participants explore and engage with the vernacular architecture of the Valle d’Itria area of the region of Puglia, southern Italy.
As the ‘strati’ in the name represents, Amanda’s experience and knowledge is multi-layered, deep, and unique. After graduating from architecture school, Amanda took the indirect approach to becoming an architect by joining the Peace Corps, and taught Industrial Arts in the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga for two years. Following the Asian tsunami in 2004, she worked with Peace Corps Response and Habitat For Humanity to design housing for tsunami survivors.
Archeworks, a multi-disciplinary, environmental and social justice design school, took Amanda to Chicago in 2007. In Chicago she co-founded a design-build firm called Grow Here! that integrated small-scale agriculture projects within the built environment. She was honored to collaborate with the Archeworks-based Mobile Food Collective by leading a workshop on food heritage and social design between American and Italian architecture students as part of the 12th Venice Biennale for Architecture in 2010.
During her five years in Chicago she worked for ENVIRON International Corporation, a global environmental consulting firm, as a LEED consultant and restoration and preservation architect. Satisfying the adventurer in her, and her persistent desire to be outside, she assessed exterior building facades for repair from suspended scaffolds on the historic high-rises of Chicago. Additionally, she consulted with a wide range of clients on sustainability issues including green building rating systems and green roofs, and assisted with the LEED certification of Italy’s first LEED Platinum building.
Intrigued and inspired by different ways of living on the planet, Amanda has travelled extensively. She has collaborated on sustainable building, community development, and small-scale agriculture projects in Italy, Bosnia, Ghana, Thailand, Tonga, France, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and New Zealand. She never ceases to be amazed by our individual and collective creativity, and the endurance of the human spirit. Committed to environmental stewardship she is driven by her passion to collaborate, to stay curious, to imagine, and to keep creating.
* Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) with Building Design & Construction Specialization (BD+C). LEED is a framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions developed by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC).