PRACTICE
PALMYRA PLLC is an award-winning woman-owned full-service design practice that works across disciplines, scales, and typologies.
The practice, like its founder, is named after the city of Palmyra in present-day Homs Governorate, Syria, a city with an independent streak and an incredibly rich multicultural history. The archaeological site of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was partially destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Even in its ruinous state, Palmyra is a palimpsest. We believe that we are never creating in a vacuum and the name of our practice serves as a reminder of that.
DESIGN APPROACH
Architecture always starts with a problem: sometimes an eminently practical one and sometimes an abstract or conceptual one. In our practice we love solving all kinds of problems, but any formal or aesthetic merits a project achieves become meaningful only after the project has met or exceeded its purpose.
Beyond the clinical joy of problem-solving there is also something deeply rewarding to the process of listening to the needs and desires of a client/end user and helping them realize their vision by infusing it with the spatial thinking, holistic planning, and technical expertise only an architect can provide. Architecture, after all, is a deeply humanistic endeavor, one that requires empathy, conviction, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge, the knowledge that comes with inhabiting a problem, internalizing its limitations, and making the judgment calls that ultimately lead to its solution.
In our work we strive to adopt this exacting but empathic approach to design.
PEOPLE
Palmyra Geraki, Principal
Palmyra Geraki (AIA, NCARB, LEED AP BD+C) is a designer, educator, writer, and editor. She is the founding principal of PALMYRA and a licensed architect in the United States (IL, NY, and CO) and Greece.
Before founding her own practice, Palmyra worked on affordable housing and other mission-driven projects as Project Manager/Project Architect at Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects in San Francisco, on a wide range of mid-rise and high-rise residential and commercial projects as an Associate at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in New York City, and on exhibition design and adaptive reuse projects at Interform in Thessaloniki.
Palmyra is also an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches design studios and seminars. Before joining the faculty there, Palmyra taught at the University of Illinois Chicago and at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She was a member of the organizing committee of the 2021 and 2022 Architecture Beyond Capitalism (A-B-C) Summer School and she has been an invited juror at universities across North America.
Palmyra served as a Skyline Editor for the New York Review of Architecture in 2022 and 2023 and her writing has appeared in several publications. She is a coauthor of the book The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education (Routledge 2024).
In 2022 Palmyra was elected Board Trustee of the AIA Chicago Foundation and in 2024 she joined the Board of Directors of The Architecture Lobby (T-A-L), an international labor advocacy organization for the AEC industry; she has been an active member of T-A-L since 2017.
Palmyra received her B.A. in 'Architecture' and 'Ethics, Politics & Economics' from Yale University and her M.Arch. from the Yale School of Architecture. At Yale, she was the recipient of the George Nelson Traveling Fellowship, the President's Public Service Fellowship, and the Curtis Prize.
Palmyra grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has lived and/or worked in New Haven, New York, Oakland, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
Taylor Halamka
Taylor Halamka is an architect from Chicago. He has a breadth of experience designing and managing cultural and institutional projects in the US and internationally, ranging from museum expansions and higher education buildings to UNESCO heritage sites and embassy planning. Prior to working with PALMYRA, his professional experience included time as a senior associate at Douglas Works and as an associate at Machado Silvetti in Boston.
Taylor co-taught two options studios at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design with Lina Ghotmeh and Mariam Issoufou and has taught introductory design studios at multiple schools. His academic output includes documentation of the Yann Weymouth / I.M. Pei archival collection at the Frances Loeb Library and collaborations on installations at both the Venice Architecture Biennale (DePaor) and Chicago Architecture Biennial (The LADG). His writing has been published in PAX Monographs, PLAT Journal at Rice University, GALT at the University of Waterloo, and drawings he produced were featured in Praxis.
He holds a Master of Architecture I degree with Commendation from Harvard and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture degree from Washington University in St. Louis where he graduated with the school’s top award: the Frederick Widmann Prize for all around excellence in architectural studies.
Jack Wakeley
Jack Wakeley (CPHC) is a multidisciplinary designer-fabricator with experience in architectural, interior, and graphic design, as well as metal fabrication, carpentry, and woodworking.
Before joining PALMYRA, Jack worked as a metal fabricator in Portland, Oregon, where he designed and built custom architectural elements. He also worked as a carpenter and woodworker in Upstate New York (Buffalo and Albany), designing and renovating various spaces – including a late nineteenth-century residence in South Buffalo, a 1960’s horse trailer as a pop-up store, commercial retail environments, and other residential projects. He also had a brief stint as a carpenter for a homestead in Lecce, Italy, focusing primarily on low-budget construction and the use of recycled material.
Jack holds a BSArch from the University of Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, and both a MArch and MIArc, along with a Certificate to Teach Technical Courses in Architecture, from the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Environment. At the University of Oregon his research focused on the health, diversification, and revitalization of urban cores through increased transparency in craft, manufacturing, and industrial practices – particularly in underutilized urban spaces and through the reuse of waste materials.
Originally from Albany, New York, Jack has lived in Buffalo, Eugene, Portland, and Chicago.
Will Lathrop
Jennie Crandall
Sigurds Kakulis
CURRENT COLLABORATORS
Bill Sturm
PAST COLLABORATORS
Tyler Lonadier
Tom Godinez
Aruna Bolisetty
Juan Suarez
David Ramis
Kristin D'Strana
Tom Godinez
Aruna Bolisetty
Juan Suarez
David Ramis
Kristin D'Strana
PREVIOUS PROJECTS
CENTURY PLAZA
Firm: Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects
Team Member: Palmyra Geraki
Role: Project Architect
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Status: Under construction
Project Type: Hotel & Residential, Tall Building, Mixed-Use, Master Planning
Size: 1,090,000 sf | Budget: $2.5 billion
Firm: Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects
Team Member: Palmyra Geraki
Role: Project Architect
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Status: Under construction
Project Type: Hotel & Residential, Tall Building, Mixed-Use, Master Planning
Size: 1,090,000 sf | Budget: $2.5 billion
CASA ADELANTE
Firm: Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects
Team Member: Palmyra Geraki
Role: Project Architect
Location: San Francisco, CA
Status: Completed (2021)
Project Type: Affordable housing, childcare, commercial
Size: 155,000 sf | Budget: $80 million
Firm: Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects
Team Member: Palmyra Geraki
Role: Project Architect
Location: San Francisco, CA
Status: Completed (2021)
Project Type: Affordable housing, childcare, commercial
Size: 155,000 sf | Budget: $80 million
SERVICES
Architecture
Interior Design
Exhibition Design
Urban Design
Masterplanning
Programming
Interior Design
Exhibition Design
Urban Design
Masterplanning
Programming
CONTACT
Our primary office is in the Monadnock building in downtown Chicago. We also operate out of Milwaukee, WI, and Thessaloniki, Greece.
p: +1 872 216 0275
p: +1 872 216 0275
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