Ipswich, MA — Daniel’s chosen path to his current station, although unconventional in many ways, is also the key to his success as an architect. Time logged as a history teacher, museum curator, carpenter and deck hand have all influenced the designer he is today. Inspired by his work on several South Mountain Company designed buildings on Martha’s Vineyard during the late 1980’s, Mr. Bates approached his formal architectural training at the University of Pennsylvania with a builders sensibility honed by six years of swinging a hammer. His understanding of the complexities of construction is thus based on hands on experience which helped inform his graduate school design explorations and serves him well today in private practice.
Daniel’s early grounding in the humanities at Brown University also distinguishes him from most of his peers affording him different skill sets from many who took more traditional educational paths into the profession. The liberal art background and its focus on diversification and expression via the written word, in contrast to the parochial and often one dimensional training of the modern architect, provide an ability to clearly communicate in non-visual methods. Graduating from Brown University in 1984 with a BA in History he has maintained his interest in Americana and historic preservation to this date, most recently with the three year epic renovation to his First Period Ipswich home completed in 2007.
Senior enough to have learned to draft by hand, he is also fortunate to have acquired his Masters of Architecture amidst the multimedia and digital design explosion of the 1990’s which has helped revolutionize architect’s methodologies for expressing design solutions. Considering himself a generalist, Daniel is equally comfortable designing a 42,000 sq. ft. biotech lab fit-up as he is detailing an eave assembly.
