Virginia McAllister ’84 had been working as an architect for more than a decade when she realized something needed to change. She’d long endured the indignities that came with being a woman in a famously male-dominated field. But the final straw came during a business trip with her then-boss at the architecture firm where she was an associate.
“He said, ‘I just want to let you know how happy we are with what you’ve been doing. We only hired you because we didn’t have any women in leadership positions and our expectations of you were very low. So we’re just pleased you exceeded them,’” recalls McAllister. “That was supposed to be a compliment.”
In that moment, McAllister decided that in order to thrive in her chosen field, she would have to start her own firm. “I was working 80 hours a week, not getting paid enough, and not getting the recognition. So I thought, ‘Why not work for myself?’”
In 2005 she launched Iron Horse Architects. Since then, the Denver-based firm has grown to a staff of 20 and built an impressive portfolio of projects focused on government, aviation, and transportation.
Iron Horse has done light rail projects in Maryland and Colorado, and worked on the $500 million redevelopment of Denver’s Union Station, as well as the expansion of the Colorado Convention Center and a renovation of the famed Red Rocks amphitheater that brought it into ADA compliance. Often working with other firms, Iron Horse has also participated in numerous expansion and renovation projects at Denver International Airport, including a new transit center and commuter rail station connecting travelers to the downtown. A new area for the firm is bus rapid transit, a more cost-effective public transit option that combines light rail and bus services in densely populated urban corridors. “It’s kind of cool to be able to have an impact,” she says.
Science and technology are also an important niche for McAllister’s firm, which has worked on highly specialized facilities such as state-of-the-art police forensic labs, an ice core laboratory, and projects for the FDA, the NIH, and NOAA.
Along the way, McAllister has become a national leader in design-build, a rapidly growing method for getting projects built in a more efficient and collaborative way by employing a single contract for design and construction. (She is currently vice chair of the Design-Build Institute of America.)
“I started my business because I believed there was a better way to do it,” she says. “To deliver excellence in design and ensure that employees have an excellent experience doing it.”
Iron Horse has another distinction. According to McAllister, it’s the largest architecture firm in Colorado solely owned by a woman. In fact, with women making up only about 22% of licensed architects in the U.S., female-owned firms remain a rarity.
That doesn’t faze the upbeat McAllister. “I have a huge amount of faith and hope that this next generation won’t experience what a lot of us experienced. I am so excited to see what they’re going to do and the places they’re going to make — because when we’re all equal, people are going to do better architecture.”
McAllister might never have become an architect if it wasn’t for an aptitude test she took at Colgate that gave her the idea. She ended up scrapping a pre-med major for fine art and writing her thesis on a 12th- century French Gothic cathedral. When a scholar she’d quoted in her thesis came to speak at the University, the extroverted McAllister cornered him after the talk and persuaded him to take her on as a research assistant. “I ended up traveling with him for the whole summer,” she says. “It was unbelievable.”
After Colgate, McAllister earned an MA in art education at the Rhode Island School of Design, before attending Syracuse University’s School of Architecture.
During a post-college teaching stint at a school for children with disabilities, McAllister discovered something surprising about herself; an evaluation showed she was severely dyslexic. Suddenly she understood why she’d struggled so much in school. “I realized I just kind of figured out ways that I could get around it and I worked extraordinarily hard to make it through.”
Today McAllister believes she has benefited in her career by what are now seen as the strengths of dyslexia. These include creativity and the ability to problem solve through three-dimensional thinking. (It’s been noted that many of the world’s top architects and designers are dyslexic.)
Those strengths are no doubt part of what helped her become a leading expert on and advocate for the use of technology, including high-tech, three-dimensional building information modeling software that improves project management, allows clients to review changes to architectural drawings digitally, and even to “walk” through a designed space using virtual reality glasses. “We’ve been able to use these computer programs to analyze a project for sunlight and then resite the building to increase passive solar gain,” she says. “That’s something our country needs to do a lot more of.”
Says McAllister, “I’ve spent quite a bit of my career trying to find a way to do architecture differently. I’ve done things that I think a lot of people wouldn’t have risked doing, and I believe that is part of my success. I don’t know how something is going to work, but I know it will.”