From Carlow to Crown Heights

From the reading: From Carlow to Crown Heights

Alexander Buckeridge grew up in Carlow, Ireland, studied architecture at Waterford IT, and spent a formative fourth year in Brussels — working bar shifts to cover his costs and collecting advice from strangers. One patron told him to give New York a go. It took more than a decade to get there, but Buckeridge is glad he listened. After graduating in 2012, he landed an internship at Scau, the Paris firm that designed the Stade de France, arriving with almost no French and sleeping on a friend's couch. He later joined the studio of Jean Nouvel, one of the most celebrated architects in the world, working on cultural buildings where, as he puts it, the approach was poetic — driven by how people move through space, how materials behave, and how far the boundaries of design could be pushed.