Los Alamos County Project Manager Sobia Sayeda. Courtesy photo

One of the 900-square foot, 2-bedroom, stand-alone homes designed by Sobia Sayeda. Courtesy photo

Sobia Sayeda, while working for a Dallas firm, designed the Kuwait National Library, a $42 million job with program space of 34,000 sm, including a 300 seat stadium. Courtesy photo

BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com

Sobia Sayeda has been in Los Alamos working for the County for more than five years. She is outgoing and friendly with a great sense of humor and it didn’t take her long to become active in the community when she moved here with her daughter. She first served on the board of First Born, then went on to become chair of the Leadership Los Alamos board, a member of the Los Alamos Medical Center board, and she continues to volunteer for the Santa Fe Opera Guilds,

Born in Pakistan, Sobia grew up in Saudi Arabia, where her father was working as an accountant for ARAMCO. Her parents were both born in India – her father in Punjab and her mother in Kashimir. They migrated to Pakistan during the 1947 partition of British India into the independent countries of India and Pakistan. The family moved to Saudi Arabia when Sayeda was five and that was where she went to high school before coming to Mississippi, of all places, for college. Her brothers, who had was then called Florida Preparatory Academy and eventually via Georgia State University they start their graduate studies at Mississippi State University in Starkville.

“That’s how I ended up in Mississippi. I feel fortunate that I went there. I didn’t know much about schools in this country. I didn’t know anything about Mississippi or MSU and when I got there, I realized that this was an international school. We had people from all over the world on campus and it was in Mississippi of all places, I met people from South America; I had never met people from South America before or Finland and beyond or eastern European countries. It really opened my eyes to the rest of the world,” she said.|

Her school itself turned out to be one of the top professional architecture schools; there are only a handful of accredited architecture schools around the country offering professional architecture degrees, and this was one of them.

Sobia said she went through the five-year degree in Starkville with the last year being
her thesis year in Jackson, MS.

“I mostly stayed in Starkville and worked for a year in an internship between my third and fifth years for an architect in Jackson, Mississippi. Our campus reminded me a lot of Los Alamos. It had a population of around 16,000 students, faculty and their families when I was going to school there, then you would go outside of town half a mile, and you would see racism, segregation between blacks and whites,” Sobia said. “This was in the late 90s. When I went to Jackson, for the first time, I actually saw old segregation signs at water fountains that were eye-opening to me.”

For her thesis year, she decided to do her work on homelessness, and this is where her passion for affordable housing comes from. What she learned led her to homelessness issues in Jackson, Pearl and other places in Mississippi.

“That led me to relationship between mental health and homelessness. The research at that time showed that more than 80 percent of homeless people were mentally ill. So I started researching halfway homes and learned that in that period in Jackson and surrounding neighborhoods there was a lot of institutional abuse, not only the abuse of the constituents but also the abuse of the system, where people had established these halfway homes and how they were money-making machine. They were getting subsidies from the government, and I watched these people pack up their shopping bags in the morning because they were being kicked out after breakfast,” Sobia said.

Residents were on their own for lunch and then they would return to the halfway houses at 6 p.m. for dinner. During the day, they had no jobs and no place to rest. With that research in hand, Sobia decided to do her thesis project on coming up with a solution for halfway homes and how to bridge that gap between what happens in halfway homes before someone comes to owning a home.

“That led me in 2015 to establish my own non-profit that focuses on building small footprints smart homes and footprints for people in need. Through Clementine Project, my non-profit, I help people in communities with coming up with designs and I match them with contractors who agree to build these homes for $100,000,” she said.

There are a handful of such homes around Santa Fe that she has worked on since 2015. One example was when she helped a retired schoolteacher with not enough pension, waiting to be 59 1/2 so that they could start collecting social security. She also recalls helping two sisters who were a decade apart and the younger sister was in a position to start helping the older sister, who was slowly deteriorating.

“They lived in two different homes about a block and a half away from one another. I helped them to come up with the solution to have two units within one sister’s residence so that they each could live within her home independently and have their own little kitchenettes and their own independence, but be together through a door. So that’s my focus for Clementine Project,” Sobia said.

During the more than five years that she has been working for Los Alamos County, Sobia said she hasn’t had much time and focus to do a lot of this.

When she went to work for the County’s Planning Department, much of her time was spent working on modernization and re-write of the County Development Code that was established in the 1960s and had never been updated.

“That was a huge undertaking. And then I worked on updating a series of other ordinances and masterplans. I was also overseeing four different boards, so I had a late-night board meeting almost once a week including the Planning and Zoning Commission. The Community Development Advisory Board was still alive as well as the Board of Adjustment and I also had the Historic Preservation Advisory Board. I kind of put everything else on the back burner and focused on everything I was doing at the County,” Sobia said. “Maybe one day when I’m not so busy, I’ll go back to that. Every now and then I do get a call from a friend saying they heard from someone that I helped them out, so I do some quick sketches for them and hand them over to the contractors that I know.”

Coming up with housing solutions is really important to her, and that’s why Sobia was able to work with Greg Gonzales and Jeff Branch of Columbus Capital to come up with solutions for the Arbolada Subdivision and move their applications forward.

“I was also very excited about their purchase of Mari Mac. At that time the County was in the process of updating the code and there were so many code changes that we were implementing that were going to be beneficial for housing in downtown, so I’m glad that they waited for those code updates to be implemented and adapted before they submitted their plans. Once they submitted their plans they were able to get approvals within a couple of months. I was really happy to implement those changes and modernize the code,” she said.

The spring before Sobia graduated, her older brother was working in Manhattan and she went to visit him. She had looked up some of the architecture firms there just to check them out.

“I found about 10 that I could be interested in working for them. Their work seemed interesting and I sent them letters. I received three responses back and one of them reached out tome for an interview and a couple of weeks later I had an offer letter – before I graduated
after my six years of college,” she said.

The company focused on historic preservation such as the Radio City Music Hall renovations and Brooklyn Museum of Art renovations, as well as regional libraries around the country and that’s where Sobia learned about libraries of the future that had drive throughs and what archives would look like in the future.

“One of the partners was working on the Los Angeles Public Library at that time and he was learning all kinds of new things as he was designing that. So we learned a lot and I ended up working in a small studio on libraries. We designed Columbus Public Library, Connecticut Public Library and many others. It was a great studio. There were about eight of us there at the time and we would bring in interns from schools of architecture to come work with us,” she said.

All this led to her move to Dallas. Being an immigrant student, she was allowed to work in the U.S. for a year following graduation and within that year she had to secure a work visa. The company sponsored her but for her to move on to the next step of that work visa and be able to apply for a green card and permanent residency, Sobia said she had to go to another firm and show her previous experience to get ahead of all the other hundreds of applications that are submitted every year for that effort.

When she moved to Dallas, her parents had retired and were living there.

“I told myself it would only be for a couple of years, but those two years turned into eight, and I started working for really good architects that I was learning a lot from. The design of the Kuwait National Library fell in my lap. One of the princes of Kuwait went to school in Dallas and he knew some of the people I worked with. When the Kuwait National Library came up, the Minister of Construction said they wanted an American firm and the prince said, ‘I know a firm!'”

Because Sobia had library experience on her resume, even though she was a very young architect, just three years out of school, principals of the firm approached her to be one of those who would get to submit a design.

“The three of us had three different approaches and the Ministry of Kuwait ended up loving my design and the project was given to me to move it into design development. I feel so fortunate that I was able to do that. I learned so much from it – working internationally – working with their trades and trying to figure out the details, what they wanted, what materials they had available,” she said. “It was their national library, so it was a substantial project. In the early 2000s it was a $40 million project. It was a huge project, and it was a lot of fun,” Sobia said.

The library was on a museum campus, and it got Sobia into campus planning and historic preservation. There were an old mosque and an old hacienda-type complex that existed on the campus so the project had to show sensitivity to cultural resources and make a connection to the new modern museum that was being built on the other side of the campus.

Asked how does one move on from a project like that, Sobia responded, “Very carefully!” From that she moved on to working on large-scale commercial buildings for a few years.

“My employer at that time understood about me that I could go into jurisdictions and talk to them about code. I had learned enough to know how to use the code in terms of what it can allow you to do as opposed to being restrictive,” Sobia said. “So they started sending me to really tough jurisdictions like Miami-Daid County or Flagstaff, Bar Harbor, Maine, the west coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and somehow I was able to get these approvals. That taught me a lot about how code works in this country.”

She said that here in Los Alamos County, there are housing issues as well as economic development and small business issues.

“No matter where you go, I’ve been seeing this since 2000; we all have the same issues, and we all have the same restrictions if we want to look at them as restrictions or opportunities. We all go through the same elements of our built environment. I wouldn’t say Los Alamos is unique in that environment. I was in the Santa Fe area before I moved here and I heard the same stories in Santa Fe,” she said. “I was on the board of directors for the New Mexico Interfaith Housing Coalition. They built a live-work community for artists of 60 units on an old landfill that was owned by the City of Santa Fe. I watched that process and people would talk about how unique Santa Fe is. When I moved over here five years ago, I heard the same thing here. I think every community thinks they’re unique, so when you are just looking inward and focused on what’s happening here, you just think you have a unique set of issues.”

Before coming to Los Alamos County, Sobia worked in Santa Fe for about 15 years, including a couple of years for the City of Santa Fe. She worked for some small architecture companies on contract work while focusing on her own clients.

“It was interesting coming from a company with 170 employees to a place where the biggest firm I could find was nine people. Most people were sole proprietors,” she said. “I have been fortunate to have worked with so many seasoned architects who truly understand Northern New Mexico Vernacular and how to assemble building details for our high altitude climate.” She added, “It has helped me tremendously with the selection of exterior materials in one of my most recent project in the County.”

It is really impressive to see how Sobia Sayeda is leading the charge on some of Los Alamos County’s biggest upgrades, from making facilities “greener” to saving pieces of history. For the last two years she has been managing Architecture and Engineering consultant teams involved in planning, design, and construction of three major facilities in Los Alamos County.
Sobia is helping the County go green with building the first fully-electric fire station that
serves a major portion of the community in Los Alamos.

It’s a huge deal because it will be a LEED Gold facility, packed with solar panels and EV chargers to help reach County’s carbon neutrality goals by 2050. This isn’t just any fire station; it’s a massive 25,500-square-foot, two-story building designed for 10 first responders.

“I have been involved with this project since the former Fire Chief Troy Hughes reached out to me while I was serving as the Planning Manager in the Community Development Department. CDD. LAFD needed help with the site layout and figuring out the logistics of where this building might be sited and I provided them with a few schemes that the Council approved prior to selecting an architecture team to begin the design,” she said.

Sobia has also been involved with a major refresh for Betty Ehart Senior Center that is focused on reliability and the comfort of older adults in the County. The main goal is replacing an outdated HVAC system that has reached the end of its life, but the project also includes new flooring, energy-efficient lighting, a modern elevator, and various other updates to meet modern ADA standards and ensure the center is accessible and energy-efficient for years to come.

“The most fun part of my job is to figure out the scope of work and make it happen with the help of Architecture and Engineering consultants. Since I was involved with informing and advising on the recently adopted Climate Action Plan, I took this opportunity as a challenge to have the consultants focus on designing an all-electric HVAC system,” she said, adding that the design phase for this project happens to coincide with some industry-wide major changes in HVAC equipment.

“The design team had to be diligent in coordination of the design of this system with so many changes in the industry. We had to exercise flexibility and consistent coordination and communication with the manufacturers to ensure we were designing an effective and impactful system,” she said.

Sobia is also the Project Manager for the $6.4 million renovation of a 79-year-old dormitory from the Manhattan Project era. This rare wooden building is being turned into the new visitor center for the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.

“It’s basically a historic ‘time capsule’, with original wood floors from the 1940s,” she said. “To keep its character, a separate restroom facility is being constructed outside so they don’t have to tear up the original interior to meet ADA standards. Essential repairs are
scheduled for the windows and installation of a new HVAC system. A modern one-bedroom apartment for park staff will be added to the second floor,” she said.

Sadly, Sobia has been informed that her limited term position with Los Alamos County expires at the end of this year. Asked what’s next for her, she simply said, “The world is my oyster!”

Sonia Sayeda in her home office. Courtesy photo

Project Manager Sobia Sayeda, third from right, at the groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday, May 20 for the LAFD Station 4 Replacement Project on Diamond Drive in Los Alamos. Also pictured are, from left, LAFD Chief Erik Litzenberg, Los Alamos County Council Chair Randall Ryti, Councilor Ryn Herrmann, Sayeda, Councilor David Reagor and Councilor Melanee Hand. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com