Margarita holds an MArch II from UCLA, and a 5-year BArch from Rice. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech.  As we strive to live within smarter, smaller footprints, our shared spaces must be transformed to prompt individual, civic, and environmental connectiveness. As an architect and educator, Margarita pursues architecture as a civic practice, in particular through cultivating the unexpectedly precise ability of design to bring together intellectually unrelated variables into productive and meaningful connections. Big or small, architecture’s contributions to the places where we live and work are vital if they allow us to experience the ordinary in slightly extraordinary ways.  Traveling and working abroad have defined Margarita’s professional career as an architect and educator. She completed her internship and worked as a project architect at various firms including Cesar Pelli and Associates (now Pelli Clarke Pelli), Atelier Hermann Czech, and Junglim Architects. Margarita has given lectures, workshops and served as a visiting critic at institutions in the States and internationally. In 2006 her firm, noroof architects, received national recognition and several design awards including a national AIA Housing Committee citation for their first built work, the Slot House. Recent research with students probes opportunities for public architecture in the fields of “invisible science and intangible heritage.”