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Angie Lipski: A Montana Designing Woman
May 07, 2009
For anyone who has mistaken a building for four walls, a roof, and a foundation, it's worth talking to Angie Lipski, one of Missoula's leading ladies in architecture.
"Everyone wants architecture to be a science, but it's an art," Lipski says. "It is an art with some scientific layers to it. I think it's part of this whole soulfulness, this creation."
Lipski has built her life around a career that merges her passion and talents with a way to pay the bills.
Lipski received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Washington State University and has traveled the world to pursue her love of architectural design. Her architectural studies led her through Denmark and Italy to write her thesis, and through Japan, Thailand, Nepal, Northern India, and Bali to further study her world.
"The motto for that trip was that I was looking at both the secular and the sacred," Lipski, a native of Missoula, said. "The secular really is the sacred with just the daily rituals; the small rituals are what make up most of our lives."
Lipski is now an architect with the Missoula firm of MacArthur Means & Wells.
One way Lipski incorporates the secular and sacred is through a minimalist eye. Lipski strives for integrity and simplicity in her designs.
"I like clear, uncluttered spaces so that life can fill it, and humanity can fill in the space," she says. "I like to be really honest about the buildings and let them tell a subtle story."
In fact, getting down to the bare minimum is one of Lipski's favorite parts about her job.
"It's a big, huge puzzle. I look at the context, I look at the site and say 'is the context trying to tell a story? Is the historical aspect of the site trying to tell a story,'" she says.
There is another piece of the puzzle that Lipski and her partners at MacArthur, Means & Wells are sure to consider: environmental responsibility. Lipski is one of the six LEED certified architects at MacArthur Means & Wells. Leadership in Energy and Environment Design, or LEED, is a national accrediting system to determine how environmentally sensitive a building is. She shies away from projects that are not good for the environment.
"There's not an alternative to being green," says Lipski. "I can't solve all the problems, but I know this one little piece ... and someone else might know this other little piece and we can all fit together and solve this."
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