Nancy Rogo Trainer

Nancy Rogo Trainer, B.S.Arch. 1982, is one of a very small number of educators who can simultaneously lay claim to shaping young minds and the very buildings in which these minds are formed. In the classroom, Trainer spent 16 years as a professor at Drexel University, where she has taught in the school's architecture department. She further honed her abilities as an educator by teaching additional courses at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania.

But this is only one half of Nancy's story.

Nancy joined Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in 1987. There, she began by providing planning and design services for a number of academic and cultural institutions. Her projects in the two decades since have included campus plans, museums, student centers and libraries — design that helps build community by integrating social, strategic and physical goals. Within the past year, Nancy has completed campus plans for Villanova University and Bryn Mawr College, and has consulted on a number of other projects with the  University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she directed the renovation of the school's Schlesinger Library. She recently served as principal-in-charge for renovation of Harvard Divinity School’s Rockefeller Hall and for campus planning at Haverford College. 

Nancy has also directed master plans for the University of Michigan, Denver Civic Center Cultural Complex and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Her architectural projects include the Trabant University Center at the University of Delaware and VSBA’s winning competition entry for the extension of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In December 2008, Trainer was appointed to the Philadelphia City Planning Commission.

Most recently, this CUA alumna has melded her professional experience with her background as an educator by taking her CUA architecture degree halfway across the globe. On April 24, Nancy traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, and delivered the keynote address for “Conversations on Architecture 2009” — an international conference dedicated to the theme of green living, focusing on sustainability and climate-responsive architecture. 

“Creative reuse of existing structures is an important component of sustainability,” said Nancy.  “In this economy particularly, things we take for granted or think about as disposable, we should now think of as resources instead.” Trainer believes that it is the duty and charge of the next generation of architects to “consider ways in which creative repurposing can provide opportunities for sustainable development in an effort to reinvigorate [their] communities.”

And just like that, the cycle begins anew.