Drawn to Design

Mike Molinski, 33

Project Manager at Vocon

 

FAR AND AWAY: As a former Boy Scout and avid hiker, intern architect Mike Molinski transformed his passion for the outdoors from a hobby to an integral part of his work. “A care for the natural world is something I have a personal stake in,” he explains. While completing the six-year architecture program at the University of Cincinnati, Molinski balanced classes with six-month co-ops in Ohio as well as California and Tennessee, helping design smaller buildings such as elementary schools. He graduated in 2000 and moved to Portland, Ore., where sustainable architecture first started to gain popularity. “At the time I was working out there, it was really coming into the forefront,” he says.

AND HOME AGAIN: The Mentor native moved back to Cleveland in 2006 and started work with Vocon a year later. The architecture firm encourages clients to get Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, a rating developed by the U.S. Green Building Council to assess the overall sustainability of a building’s construction. He helped design FirstEnergy’s new West Akron campus, one of the first buildings in Northeast Ohio designed to meet LEED criteria. The office, which uses 28 percent less energy than a similar building, is constructed with recycled materials and features motion-sensor lighting to conserve energy. Molinski will soon become a licensed architect and plans to continue working on sustainable projects in Northeast Ohio.“People need to realize what they have and be more positive about what’s here [in Cleveland]. There’s no shame in being smaller, but we can still be better in a lot of ways.”

 

It was a class I took in high school, a drafting class. It pushed me into architecture as opposed to engineering or something. I was one of those kids that was good at math and art and was always looking for something to balance those two sides. Architecture was a great fit for me.

One thing that I’ve always tried to push for is a humane modernism. We just finished up the FirstEnergy project. We left a lot of the steel, conduits and pipes exposed, and they themselves serve as the ornamentation for the building. Where you get the visual interest is in those exposed systems that allow the building to breathe in the first place. We use them to make the building interesting.

I love solving the problem. If an issue comes up — if I have a beam and a pipe and a piece of duct work that all want to be in the same exact spot and I want it to look good and be a cost-effective solution — I take all those variables and come up with a solution that works for those types of situations.

Time. Everything needs to be done yesterday. I’m given a problem with an infinite number of solutions, and a lot of times the path isn’t coming up with the right answer but the “rightest” answer. You can come up with a million different solutions to the same problem. Coming up with the one that makes the most sense — that’s the hard part.

My ideal project would be a simple box that’s beautifully proportioned and made with beautiful materials.

The Arcade. It’s such a brightly lit space with a huge skylight overhead, ornamental ironwork inside and a terrazzo floor that must have taken forever to do. It’s just a beautiful space. There are other spaces in Cleveland that could be like that with a little more tender, loving care.