Kristine Royal wasn't used to failure. Like all of the bright minds in the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture class of 1998, Royal was prenatally brilliant, if that's possible, and only shone brighter through adolescence. By ninth grade, she was planning to design space shuttles when she grew up. But awash in the electric fluorescence of the humming woodshop in the bowels of Doherty Hall, the Carnegie Mellon freshman was sprawled over her sketchbook, head buried in her arms, death-gripping a pencil and staring straight into the unfamiliar ether of failure.
"I was a shockingly bad student when I first came to school," Royal remembers. In the waning hours before the deadline of her freshman woodshop project, Royal had royally screwed up on the table saw, accidentally lobbing off an integral piece of her project-a coffee table. Overwhelmed with frustration, anxiety, and nicotine-assisted insomnia, she broke down in to tears in the middle of the shop floor.
Within moments, Royal got a dose of the only medicine that fixes a heavy heart: a pat on the back. "One of my studio mates, Nobu Nakaguchi, came to my rescue," Royal recalls with a smile. "Nobu re-cut the piece for me while I continued to work on the other pieces. That's the beautiful thing about Carnegie Mellon. There was always someone there to hunt you down, cheer you up, and make sure you got your work done."
It was a small gesture. Royal still had miles and miles to go before she would sleep in her Donner dorm bed. Indeed, the sleep-deprived freshman would have found it difficult to fathom-as she noticed the first rays of dawn sneaking through the studio's windows-that, 15 years later, she would garner some impressive recognition from the architecture community. Royal recently received the American Institute of Architects' Young Architect Award, and she was also one of six architects recognized as an Emerging Leader in Sustainable Design by the Design Futures Council. "Freshman year, the goal was just to survive," she chuckles.
Nakaguchi's kindness, like the selflessness of so many studio mates, is what Royal cherishes today as she heads her own firm, Architecture Royal in Newport, R.I. Her specialty is converting abandoned historic relics into energy-efficient office buildings, such as the old Aquidneck Mill on the waterfront of Newport Harbor, which Royal transformed into a maritime library, administrative office, and visitor center for the International Yacht Restoration School.
She still has her share of collegiate nostalgia: the battles for control over the lone studio boombox, dressing up in outrageously extravagant costumes for the Beaux Arts Ball, and of course the happy-hour cocktail breaks at Mad Mex restaurant, which spawned her studio's mantra, "Friends don't let friends drink and draft."
But that one lonesome, early morning in the woodshop always comes back to Royal, especially when she sits down for dinner at night with her husband and 2-year-old son. The infamous coffee table sits proudly in her dining room, a reminder of those terrible, beautiful years of laughter and tears.
