School of Architecture
For Rachel Zsembery (B.Arch ’00), architecture has never been just about buildings.
Zsembery is president and CEO of Bergmeyer, a design collaborative and Certified B Corporation with offices in Boston, Columbus and Los Angeles.
In a pair of graduation ceremony addresses to the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture’s undergraduate and graduate students on May 8, and a wide-ranging conversation thereafter, she provided an inspirational roadmap to people-centered design, through a skill set she calls “architecture AND.”
The boundaries around architecture education, especially at an interdisciplinary powerhouse like Carnegie Mellon, have always been contested. Some educators insist on a curriculum shaped by time-tested principles of architectural design and construction geared toward licensed professional practice; others go the “architecture as liberal arts 2.0” route, viewing the discipline as a path to all kinds of work, from urban planning to video game design.
Zsembery neatly sweeps these dichotomies to the side and invites — nay, urges — architects to have it all.
The problems facing communities today, she says, are too interconnected to be solved by one discipline operating alone. She invokes AI, climate change and social justice — coincidentally, the school’s key areas of pedagogical focus — as challenges that must be solved interdisciplinarily and with devoted focus on human designers, users and community members.
Narrow definitions of architecture, Zsembery cautions, are ill-suited to address the most pressing global and local challenges. “By expanding the box that architects and architecture have tightly put themselves in for the past 50 years,” she explained, “we are able to create much richer solutions and really center people in our work. CMU taught me to be comfortable at the intersection of disciplines and to see curiosity as a design tool.”
Zsembery’s leadership team has restructured Bergmeyer to prioritize climate action and social justice as core to its business practice, becoming certified as a B Corporation for an added layer of accountability. Zsembery also sits on the steering committee for the Best Spaces™ Standard, a set of methodologies centering inclusive design and design outcomes.
These initiatives illustrate a key tenet of her leadership: people-centered design outcomes grow from systems, structures and skill sets that prioritize them.
“Design alone doesn’t create impact,” she asserted. “Impact comes from the structures around the work, including who has a voice, how decisions are made, what gets measured, and whether organizations are willing to align their operations with their values.”
A strong idea is only the beginning. The real work is carrying it forward: through people, process, evidence, collaboration, constraints, and the messy reality of making something matter.
Address to graduating students as the 2026 School of Architecture Diploma Ceremonies alumni speaker
Zsembery acknowledges the difficulty of sustaining the “real work of carrying ideas forward” over decades, especially when progress feels impossible or incremental. She encourages fellow leaders that being “people-centered” applies to firms’ internal priorities, as well as their external community relationships.
Keeping this in mind, she holds mentorship and coaching as integral components of the design practice at Bergmeyer and urges others to do the same. Zsembery herself benefits from the mutual support, accountability and problem solving she finds in a peer-mentorship group with other women leaders in the design industry. Over the course of 15 years together, they have navigated the complexities of leadership, career evolution and sustaining momentum through personal and professional milestones.
Zsembery views her connection with CMU as an opportunity for continued mentorship, as well.
“One of the things I value most about the Carnegie Mellon Architecture community is how generous alumni are with students and young professionals. I try to do the same when any Carnegie Mellon student reaches out, to help them work through whatever questions they have, or simply to understand how vast, and how perhaps different from their expectations, the profession is. As an alum, it’s one of my greatest joys and responsibilities as we continue to evolve the profession.”
It is in those conversations — and in the priorities and systems they engender — that Zsembery situates people-centered design. As she told the Class of 2026, designers must constantly be asking: “Who is this for? What are their needs? And how do we get there — together?"
featuring the following:
photography by Long Q Hong
Rachel Zsembery addresses the graduating class of undergraduate students
as the 2026 Architecture Diploma Ceremonies alumni speaker