“I like to dig into how two materials connect and what that moment has to be. Everything that I enjoy in architecture involves efficiently and beautifully doing as we’re asked while making it constructible.”

Meet the Team | Sean

Project Architect R. Sean Darnell’s affinity for materiality plays a key role in his approach to architectural practice. As he puts it, “math and craft got me to architecture school.” After beginning his studies in engineering for material science, he transferred to art school to earn his Bachelor of Fine Arts and started a craft furniture business, before ultimately pursuing a Master of Architecture degree. At KMB architects, this means that Sean easily plugs into any team and provides his technical perspective for the benefit of all the firm’s project types.

As a self-described “tumbleweed who goes where the wind blows,” Sean has practiced architecture in Montana; Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; and Seattle. This has exposed him to a variety of building typologies from healthcare, commercial, and mixed-use to multi-family, civic, and institutional, and further solidified Sean’s belief that architecture should be grounded in the context of place.

“One of my favorite projects is an apartment building sited on the edge of the Alphabet District in Portland–a historic neighborhood of mansions from the 1880s to 1950s as well as the beautiful Temple Beth Israel. The design process involved walking the area to capture the flavor of the neighborhood through photographs and sketching front doors and pediments that spoke to me, and then translating that into the design. That’s the wonderful part of architecture—collecting, deconstructing, and translating a place into a thing.”  

Sean’s interests outside of architecture center around things that spin—vinyl records, bicycles, pottery wheels, and lathes for woodworking. Sean and his daughter have been building the family vinyl collection over the last seven years, making sure to check for local record stores any time they travel. Often travel is by bicycle, on a single, fixed-gear bike that Sean has built himself, because it allows him to take in the beauty of his surroundings at a leisurely pace.