Alenka remembers her first introduction to architecture: When she was 10 or 11 years old, flipping through a home-design magazine. “I thought, I want to live in a house like that,” she says, adding that she would trace the magazine’s floor-plan diagrams as if she were designing them. And like many of her peers, she started building with Legos—“we never had enough!” Alenka decided to pursue a formal education in architecture after her second year in college, and started practicing in 1996, working in small firms in the Bay Area where she gained wide experience across an array of building and client types. Alenka joined the Senior Living practice at Perkins Eastman’s San Francisco office in 2015, where she’s put her considerable expertise in drawing and detailing to work on the firm’s many senior communities on the West coast. “Perkins Eastman has a really high standard of design,” she says, which means that for residents of the many communities they deliver, “the care that goes into it is the same, regardless of income level.”

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As a former green coordinator for the San Francisco studio, Alenka aims for high performance and sustainability in every project she designs. She also participates in the firmwide mentorship program, where she’s served as both mentee and mentor. The program has been important for her advancement, she says, and wants to help others do the same.