After earning an undergraduate degree in interior architecture, Trang switched course when she made a serendipitous visit to the renowned Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “That just blew my mind,” she says. “It demonstrated how much you can do with a building—not just picking the colors and furniture. It just clicked. I wanted to know more about how to design buildings that make an impact—create a building holistically from the inside out.” That visit led to her decision to pursue a master’s degree in architecture, and she’s been practicing with Perkins Eastman since she graduated in 2015.
Trang specializes in K-12 Education. She’s passionate about designing schools that have broad access to daylight, healthy indoor air quality, and whose interiors are designed with sustainable and healthy materials. She wants to know the experience of each student, teacher, or staff member as they travel through a school during the day, and then she uses that information to focus on design with functionality. It’s always satisfying for her when she gets to work on projects from the early phase of design to the end of the construction phase, including material and furniture selections.
She has become the go-to for material selections in the firm’s Costa Mesa studio. Her fulfillment comes with every new school project that opens to its students. Describing one recent ribbon-cutting with groups of elementary students seeing their new library building for the first time, she says, “It’s a priceless moment, seeing all their expressions.”
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Trang serves as the Green Coordinator for the Costa Mesa studio. She is a also member of the studio’s Material Health Subcommittee and oversees its materials library. Prior to her current roles, she was a member of her studio’s DE&I, Women’s Leadership Initiative, and Design committees.