Patrick Lins (BSArch '26) Named 2025 Hart Howerton Fellow

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The UVA School of Architecture congratulates Patrick Lins (BSArch '26), who received a 2025 Travel Fellowship with Hart Howerton, a global planning and design firm comprised of planners, architects, landscape architects and interior designers headquartered in New York and San Francisco with a network of domestic and international offices.

Since its inception in 2006, Hart Howerton's Fellowship program has provided students with professional office experience, collaborative interdisciplinary design, and travel opportunities. This year, the firm received the highest number of applicants since the Fellowship was established. Now in its nineteenth year, the Fellowship offers an unparalleled learning experience, allowing students to work alongside Hart Howerton's project teams in either the New York or San Francisco offices while pursuing self-defined research and travel topics. After their travel, Fellows return to the firm to complete their professional internships and present a final report to the team. 

Lins is one of three of this year's fellows selected from universities across the country, and was also selected as the one fellow whose position is awarded in memory of Michael Cunningham, a long-time Principal with the firm and a strong advocate for bridging professional practice and education. 

"The energy, enthusiasm, and quality of research from each new class of Hart Howerton Fellows continues to be exceptional," says Dave Howerton, FASLA, Chairman of Hart Howerton. "It's rewarding to support the next generation of design thinkers and the unique perspective they will bring to our practice," adds Jim Tinson, FAIA, Chief Executive Officer.

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Photo by Josie Drumheller

Lins will be traveling to the history-rich Boyne Valley in Ireland where he will study the relationship between the Earth, mythology, and the built environment at a variety of scales, from the regional to the individual. He said, "Using Newgrange as a nexus of study and home base, I will be choreographing a quest through the valley to a series of different sites." His itinerary includes the Hill of Tara, Hill of Ward, the Loughcrew Cairns, Dowth, and Knowth. 

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I plan to explore how the built environment can interact with the mythos of place, and how storytelling can be used as a medium to both enhance our designs and rethink their interaction to the land and its history.

Lins shared that the opportunity represents several 'firsts': his first experience working at an architecture office, his first time living in a city, and his first time completing independent architectural research. Through the experience he hopes to both learn a lot and be challenged, while also honing skills he has gained as a student. Specifically, Lins shared how excited he is to "have the opportunity to perform research on a site that I can visit firsthand, allowing me to gain insights that are invisible when looking at pictures an maps on a computer screen."

Following his travel research, Lins will return to Hart Howerton’s office to share the outcomes of the research and to gain both technical and design experience at a variety of different scales through his internship. Anticipating this aspect of the fellowship, Lins reflected on his academic and professional growth: 

I hope that working with this dedicated and creative group of designers will foster my own curiosity and inform my design-research process in the future.

"Working directly with a team and several mentors will help me build important soft skills and tap into a wealth of collective architectural knowledge."