This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
09/29/2021 08:30 AMWhen Chester Elementary School students sit in the new open-air meeting space adjacent to Chester Elementary School, they aren’t thinking about Cassie Archer. But Cassie is an important part of the reason they are there. She designed the structure, which was the inspiration of Chester residents Lol and Charlene Fearon, who spearheaded fundraising for the project. The open-air meeting space is also available for community use after school hours.
Lol Fearon was once principal of Chester Elementary and Charlene Fearon taught there for 39 years.
Cassie first heard about the project from the Fearon’s daughter Caitlin, who is an executive assistant at Centerbrook Architects. She messaged Cassie, an architect at the firm, asking if she knew anybody who could help out with the design of the space. Indeed, Cassie did.
“I thought I could,” she recalls.
Cassie talked to the Fearons, heard their vision for the space, and walked the site so the new construction would harmonize with the surroundings.
“When I saw that it was next to the nature trail, I knew it had to be timber-frame,” she says.
Most of the structure is Eastern yellow pine, which she says stands up well to the elements, with cedar railings. Using cedar, often employed in outdoor building, for everything was not possible.
“Given the pandemic, prices [of cedar] had skyrocketed,” she notes.
Heritage Post & Beam of Killingworth did the construction.
“Price was a big thing and they understood this was a community project,” Cassie says. “They were very easy to work with.”
Cassie volunteered all her time and she also credits her colleagues at Centerbrook Architects.
“They were aware of what I was doing and [understood] if I had to say that I had to pop out for a minute,” she says.
According to Chester Elementary Principal Tyson Stoddard, the outdoor area is already in use by all grades at the school.
“There’s a scramble to sign up,” he says.
The open-air meeting space has wi-fi access so students can use their Chrome book laptops there for assignments. It is also the location for nature and science programs by the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center; last year, according to Stoddard, the programs had to be done virtually.
Cassie, now a senior architect at Centerbrook, was born in Pittsburgh; her father was a consulting engineer for an electrical company. At the age of three, her family moved to Nigeria, her parents’ native country. Then, when she was 11, the family moved again, this time to Leicester, England, where Cassie did her high school, getting both her O-levels and her A-levels, as is the British system.
That educational pattern can cause misunderstanding for Americans, Cassie says. The last two years of high school in England, when a student is working to pass A-Levels, are called college in Britain. The four years after that, which Americans call college, are called university in England.
“I realize it can be confusing for people here, so usually I gloss over it,” Cassie says.
She was interested in photography, but her mother noticed she often photographed buildings and arranged for an internship with an architect. Cassie remembers it as a great experience.
Cassie wanted to come to the United States to study and applied to Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. The school’s location was something her family approved of—she had relatives in Massachussetts.
“You know Nigerian parents; they want someone to keep an eye on you,” she says.
She also added that professional ambitions for children are very much a part of Nigerian parenting.
“Nigerian parents push their kids,” she says. “They want them to be doctors and engineers.”
In her first semester at Wentworth, Cassie met Drew Archer. Second semester they began to date. They have been together ever since. They decided after graduation they would both go wherever the first one of the pair got a job. It was Drew and the location was across the country, in Santa Cruz, California.
Cassie was able to find a job with an architectural firm. But in the process of sending out résumés, she found something she hadn’t expected. Her surname, before marriage to Drew, was Giwa-amu. She found she was getting few responses in her job search. Then her brother suggested she just use half of it: Amu.
“Amu could really be anything. I immediately started getting responses. I couldn’t understand that,” she says.
After five years, the couple decided to return to the East coast. The high cost of housing was part of the reason.
“We thought about what forever would look like out there and decided it was just too expensive,” she says.
Initially, the couple lived with Drew’s family in Old Lyme, where he had grown up. Now they have their own house in East Haddam. Cassie is a gardener and she has also started pottery lessons at Earth and Fire Art Studio in Essex.
“It makes a nice work-life balance,” she says.
As for the work part, she points out her office is only 10 minutes away.
When the couple came East, Drew started his own business, Blackkat Leather in Chester. Cassie worked for an architectural firm in New Haven before joining Centerbrook Architects.
Cassie looks back with pleasure over the work she did for the open-air meeting space.
“I’m passionate about things like education and community. It was a lucky day when I got that job,” she says.