Aimee Gray remembers when she was studying architecture in school and she and her fellow students were taught that the buildings they would build in their careers would likely have a short lifespan.
“They were telling us that we should anticipate that the buildings we were designing would have a 40-year lifespan,” says Aimee. “Wow, that is crazy. That means I will design buildings that will be torn down in my lifetime.”
That didn’t sit well with Aimee, the owner and principal architect at A3G Architects, an architectural and interior design firm based in historic downtown Liberty. Her goal is not only to build things that last but to preserve the history of her community. A3G Architects works on all sorts of projects, ranging from commercial to residential and including new builds, but Aimee has a soft spot for historic preservation.
“It's a very American mentality,” she says of the tear-down nature of modern American construction. “That just doesn't make a lot of sense as far as the amount of embodied energy you have in a building and everything that went into constructing it. If we can improve that and find a way to repurpose buildings versus tearing them down, it seems much more practical to me and better stewardship of our materials and our environment.”
Aimee has been working in architecture for 23 years. She is one of three sisters whose names also begin with A (hence the A3 in A3G) and architecture seemed like a natural fit for her from the beginning.
“I had a strong interest in both math and science while being a natural creative so it was a good fit for me right out of the gate,” says Aimee. “I liked the blend of art, math and science. To me, architecture is practical, livable art.”
Aimee really enjoys the challenge of historical preservation.
“I think the challenge and the interest in historic projects are that you want to try to preserve as much of the natural historical elements as you can, while not replicating things to match it but to contrast and complement the historic,” she says. “So sometimes there's a tendency to want to come in and replicate a historic design and its elements, but really, that's not the goal of historical preservation — it’s to preserve what is historically valuable, and then complement it with things that are modern.”
Aimee enjoys honoring history but also modernizing buildings for use today. Her own office building, an 1869 three-gabled Gothic-style building in historic downtown Liberty, has had many purposes over the years. She says the architectural style of their office is quite unique, and she enjoyed renovating the building for commercial use. Some of her favorite elements in the building include the hand-turned stair rail and the brick chimneys throughout.
“It's something that if we don't put effort into preserving, it'll just go away,” says Aimee.
Aimee doesn’t just work on preserving historic buildings as her job, though. She’s especially passionate about preserving the history of her community and has held many positions on Historic Downtown Liberty, Inc., working to keep downtown Liberty's square vibrant and a great place to visit, live and work. She’s currently a design chairwoman and knows that it’s important to maintain the downtown's buildings and culture.
‘It's very easy for people to come into Liberty and never come into downtown Liberty,” says Aimee. “Unless there's an effort put in by the community to keep this area vibrant, these communities are just dried up, empty storefronts. It's really a huge effort on everybody's part to keep things viable and to keep people coming downtown.”
Aimee and her team have worked on multiple historic preservation projects in downtown Liberty, such as the Madison Miller house and 232 W. Kansas Street. It’s such a good fit for Aimee’s firm, with their blend of passions for historic Liberty and preservation builds.
Her team has also loved working on historically-inspired projects, like a new build for a family on Reinking Street who wanted a more compartmentalized floor plan for their young family rather than the modernized open-concept floor plans that are popular in new construction today. She says she often gets feedback from women and wives on projects that they love working with A3G, as they find her team helpful in navigating the very masculine world of construction. Aimee prides herself on listening to her client’s needs and creating a design that brings the owner’s vision to reality, not an ego-driven design.
Here’s to hoping we can see Aimee’s new architectural projects standing for hundreds of years, much like the ones she works so hard to preserve today.
“It's something that if we don't put effort into preserving, it'll just go away,” says Aimee.