He didn’t know it at the time, but Scott Daniel’s future was wrapped up under the Christmas tree. “I have a great Christmas memory,” Daniel recalled. “I got an Erector Set and, man, I loved that. It was the greatest gift in the world.” Daniel would tinker with that set, and Lego blocks and Lincoln Logs. Building and breaking down structures, all the while designing a future in architecture that he couldn’t imagine at the time.
Today, he can drive through Asbury Park and see buildings in the city that have his fingerprints on them, but it’s not only here. His work has taken him all over the globe, from Las Vegas to Istanbul and spots in between. And he can trace it all back to his formative years in Bergen County. “I was good at math, but I was a good artist, also,” Daniel said. “I took arts all the way through high school.
I kind of put two-and-two together and became an architect.” It was a little more complex than Daniel suggests, of course. He leveraged his math skills with his artistic talents – which go beyond drawing and sculpting – into an actionable career. He thought about pursuing engineering, but found it to be “pretty rigid. Architecture has more artistic components to it.” Daniel studied at NJIT, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, and later earned an MBA from the University of Arizona. He worked for big firms, and on big projects, including the National Defense University in Kazakhstan, “which would be comparable to West Point,” Daniel said.
Aside from a 5-year detour to Scottsdale, Arizona, for work, Scott, his wife Heather, and their daughter have been settled in Ocean Township since 1999. “We missed the ocean and the tri-state culture so much,” Daniel said. While he was balancing big projects, from a 32-story building in China to the Tulsa Cancer Center, Daniel was also nourishing another passion– music. “I started off playing the drums as a youngster,” Daniel said, noting that he turned his focus from drums to sports in high school, which is also when he began to learn to play guitar. “I self-taught myself all the way up to about two years ago, and I started taking lessons.” Daniel enrolled at Lakehouse Music Academy, and it proved to be a rewarding choice. “Lakehouse just wants you to get a feel for what you want to play and listen to. I said, ‘Well, I have been playing Grateful Dead music’,” Daniel said. “I didn’t know anybody, and we just gelled because of the love of the music. It’s a great, great, great program.” For Daniel, music also reveals a part of his personality to clients. He went out on his own in 2022 with his namesake firm, Scott Daniel Architecture, and his office is adorned with a smattering of music memorabilia – he thinks he has been to over 100 Grateful Dead shows (yes, he knows that most Deadheads make that claim) – which is often a conversation starter. “I’ve had people say ‘Hey, you’re in a band? I didn’t know that.’ It’s a great icebreaker.”
So while music, with Ship of Fools being the Dead-inspired name of their band, scratches one creative itch for Daniel, designing projects big and small satisfies the other (he has an affinity for beach houses). “What’s really cool about what I’m doing now, is working with the music culture, which is really what is bringing Asbury back,” he said of having a foot in both the economic and arts scenes. “I really believe in that, and I'm happy to be in that movement now.”
“What’s really cool is working with the music culture, which is bringing Asbury back, and I'm happy to be in that movement."