Staff

Brenda Stanfield, AIA, LEED AP+

“What gives me the greatest satisfaction in our work is to make a connection between an architect or designer and a material previously unknown that becomes part of a building project—the timeliness of it when it happens! I also love discovering the next latest and greatest material or technology that I can share with our clients. The world of material technology has exploded during the last decade making it an exciting time to be in this industry.”

Brenda’s interest in art and design through all her primary and secondary education years eventually led her to study interior design and architecture, first at the University of Missouri, earning a Bachelors in Interior Design, and then to the Boston Architectural Center and Washington University in St. Louis where she earned her M.Arch. Her professional career included a year with Cambridge Seven Associates and 16 years at The Architects Collaborative. During her years as a practicing architect, her skills evolved from design to mastering the process of programming and planning--collecting, assembling and disseminating information, which would become the foundations for new and renovated building projects. These skills are the ones she put to use in her own business, Building and Design Resources, launched in 1993 as a resource for information, designed to serve all those in the building industry. It was her own need for information during the recession of the early 90s that was the inspiration for this business, but it is her love of information and the desire to share it, along with her practical experience, that keeps it relevant.

Mara Ellsworth

Mara has been with Building Design and Resources for the past twelve years and has experience working in architectural firms throughout Boston and Cambridge.

She has a B.A. in Art History from Barnard College, studied architectural lighting design at Parson’s School of Design, has a B.Arch from the Boston Architectural Center and has pursued an M.Arch at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Prior to working with BDR, Mara interned at Fisher-Marantz Lighting Design in New York City, started her own company, Neon Design Associates in Brooklyn, and worked as an architectural designer at a number of firms in the Boston/Cambridge area including Moshe Safdie Associates and Symmes, Maini, McKee.

At Building & Design Resources, Mara has reconnected with the “physicality” that initially attracted her to architecture—the building materials, colors, finishes and lighting—the elements which bring architecture to life. Mara brings to BDR an unparalleled enthusiasm and creativity for the search for the perfect material to meet a specific need or application. She makes sure the sources are reliable, often finds less   expensive alternatives, is able to locate necessary samples quickly, and   ferrets out the truly sustainable products from those subject to “greenwashing”. In other words, she always goes the extra distance for our clients.

Sandra Roedel, LEED AP

Sandy’s background reveals clearly what drew her to Building and Design Resources. Her education includes two Associates degrees, one from New York’s Fashion Institute and one in textile design from RIT, and a BA in Art History from Wellesley College. After a professional career that included interior design for friends and family, being a clothing buyer for The Lodge in Harvard Square, and being a co-founder and operator of Bakers' Best, a specialty food shop/café, where she focused on interior design and display, purchasing, baking and the hospitality aspects of the business, she followed a mid-career interest in libraries and the invaluable services they offer. This interest brought her back to school to earn a Masters in Library Science from Simmons College. After an introduction to the world of special libraries working as an assistant librarian for Prentice Hall, she found her way to BDR.

Sandy’s keen sense of hospitality makes her a welcome presence in all of her libraries. She is resourceful in life and in her job, and is tenacious in finding the right answers, especially when it’s a totally new topic on a subject or material she has never researched before. She loves being a part of the design process, loves her job with BDR and looks forward with enthusiasm each and every day as she heads to the libraries of our client firms. As Brenda says, “what more could a ‘boss’ ask for!”

Donna Parrish

Design, art and architecture are at the center of Donna's education and work. She earned a BFA in Communication Design from Parsons School of Design and worked as a graphic designer at CBS Records. She was introduced to architecture at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, worked at Lehrer McGovern in construction management, and then at UVA Architecture and Engineering Services as an intern. From both fields of work, she took on an interest in photography and spent a year in Italy photographing industrial towns and studying landscape and urbanism, and how industry and public life once coexisted. She started a family in Massachusetts while working in residential renovation and remaining active in community development interest groups. Using her background, she was an active volunteer in schools helping students gain an understanding of the important relationship between people and the built environment. With a Box City Boston Society of Architects program and years of school-wide and classroom projects, she helped integrate art and architecture into academic curriculums.

Donna’s understanding of design principles and processes, and her heart for understanding the relationship between people and the built environment, has extended to a keen interest in the field of environmental psychology. Her work at Building and Design Resources, in many firms that specialize in education and healthcare, has made evident the importance of product research for the designers she supports and for whom she spares no effort in her thorough investigations of the issues raised in each search for materials.

Melissa Terry, Associate AIA, LEED AP

“I think of our libraries as resources for new and changing information and repositories for useful design materials. I love working to develop these resources over time and fine-tuning them for the work and styles of a particular group of designers and architects. It's actually really challenging and satisfying to act as a resource for these materials within the design process!”

With a family history in fashion and construction, it was not a great leap to find Melissa studying Italian and Art History at Vassar College and later earning her M.Arch from MIT. As an Art History major she spent time in Florence, Italy and later returned to work under a grant on art restoration projects there. Then as an architectural designer she cut her teeth on commercial, educational and hospitality projects while working for Arrowstreet and Benjamin Thompson in Cambridge. Her early work was on projects involving building conversions and reuse, as well as several hotels in the Middle East. Her mid-career was in exhibit design for Jerry Johnson Inc., an industrial designer in Boston who specialized in zoos and aquariums, upgrading animal environments to architecturally designed natural habitats. To round this out she again explored conservation and museum collections working with the National Park Service where she discovered a love of organizing materials and information accessibility. These experiences combine to form her interest in design materials and information resources at BDR where she enjoys the vitality of the exchange of ideas and information.

Jenya Zhilina

As an architectural historian and an experienced archivist with over 10 years of experience with Massachusetts architectural firms, Jenya knows the importance of the complete life cycle of records, whether organizing active project paper and digital architectural and administration documentation or sorting through old moldy blueprints. For legal, historical, design and construction administration purposes, she creates and implements record management and archival systems tailored specifically to the needs of each of our architectural firm clients. She coordinates and maintains materials in off-site storage, making both security and accessibility her top priorities. Once Jenya‘s Record and Information Management (RIM) and Archival Systems are in place, they can easily be maintained by office staff, for which she provides orientation and training.

Jenya’s sunny personality, combined with her efficient and systematic approach to records management, has made her essential with many of our clients. While wearing her “historian” hat, she has even featured some of the architectural projects, with which she has been involved, in publications. Jenya takes pride in preserving the legacies of the firms she serves. She is a member of the Society of Architectural Historians as well as of the Society of Americans Archivists.

Originally from St.-Petersburg, Russia, Jenya is currently a PhD candidate at the Russian Academy of Arts working on a dissertation on H.H. Richardson. While in Russia, she also taught at the Academy of Arts and at the European University, both in St. Petersburg—courses on the History of New England Architecture and on Historic Preservation in New England. She has been living with her family in Boston for the past fourteen years.

Lydia Clancy

Lydia is the newest member of the BDR staff. Throughout her childhood her architect-father stressed the importance of good design and building aesthetics. The majority of photos from family trips were often of the buildings or ruins of the area visited, rather than the people (or the family). So it came as a shock to Lydia when her father told her that he didn’t want her to become an architect, because “one struggling architect in the family is enough.”   After having worked for many years as a product stylist, visual merchandiser and trade show exhibit coordinator, she enrolled in the BAC’s Master of Interior Design degree program to become a display designer. While working as the in-house librarian at a local architecture and interior design firm, however, she realized that she much preferred facilitating the design process than doing the actual design work.

Lydia’s love of arranging, organizing and cataloging makes her a perfect fit for any materials resource library. The skills she honed in the retail environment give her an amazing ability to display the samples in a library and exhibit them in such a way as to encourage “shopping”. With her love of color, she is most partial to working with decorative plastics, paints and textiles, but really enjoys working with all the finish materials. She has found her calling in assisting architects and designers in their quest for “good design” an architectural resource librarian.