Welcome to another addition of the Meet the Team! Fatou has been with us since June 2019 and has quickly made her mark on our team by being a REVIT expert and is one of our BIM Coordinators. As an Architectural Designer, Fatou has a lot of involvement with the Dave & Buster’s brand, working on multiple locations from Cary, NC to the newest projects in Texas & Pennsylvania. She also has been involved with Supercharged, the Hawthorne Casino project, and has even worked a bit with Cooper’s Hawk on one of their new locations. Prior to her time at Aria, she worked at a handful of other local architecture firms and attended the Illinois Institute of Technology for her degree in Architecture. Read on below to learn more about Fatou!
Fatou’s home country Senegal.
Where did you grow up? Senegal, known as the “Gateway to Africa” and located at the western-most point of the continent is served by multiple air and maritime travel routes. The country lies at an ecological boundary where semiarid grassland, oceanfront, and tropical rainforest converge. Fun Fact: There is an exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago about Senegal.
Fatou and her family visiting Guanajuato, Mexico.
Do you have any children? How many and what are their names and ages? Yes, Ramatoulie (12) Abdoul Ahad (3)
What is your ideal “I think I’ll call in sick today” day? Rainy Day (I hope this will not catch up with me one day, lol).
What is something you get overly competitive about and why? Anything I sign up for, I give it my all. An example of this is the first time I came to the US, I had decided to go to school here despite studying in French language all my life. Some people had said not to bother with the studies because it was their opinion that a lot of immigrants that started school here did not finish. This made it a competition for me.
Also, another example that is more recent, was during Aria’s summer wellness challenge (which I am on top of the leaderboard). The challenge consists of daily tasks that we have to complete in order to build some healthy habits. I’ll let you in on a secret (don’t tell my competitors), I go to the gym at 6:00 am for an hour just to get half of my 10,000 steps in daily.
Fatou worked on an award winning community center designed and built in Chile while she attended IIT.
Best travel story? I have a few, but I’ll go with my Chile trip. Summer 2016 while at IIT we traveled to Chile for our Design Build Studio. Even though it was hectic, it was a great experience. We designed a Pavilion in the Spring semester and built it that summer in Chile. The project won the AIA Chicago Small Project Honor Awards in 2018, and received an Honorable Mention for the Roberta Feldman Architecture for Social Justice Awards. You can read more on the project here & here.
What would be the one thing you would bring on a deserted island and why? A book, I love to read and won’t mind being alone.
Speaking of books, What’s the last book you read? The Harry Potter Collection (I bought them for my daughter but finished them before her).
Books aside, what’s the last TV show you binged/watched? Current favorite Movie? Criminal Minds & The Negotiator with Samuel L. Jackson
A rendering of a Dave & Buster’s in Cary North Carolina – a project that Fatou enjoyed working on.
Most memorable project? Dave & Buster’s in Cary North Carolina. This is because it was a new prototype design which also was challenged with a complex building structure making for a unique design opportunity.
Would you rather be poor with great style/taste or rich with horrible style/taste? Rich with horrible style/taste. I don’t really care what people think about my style as long as I’m comfortable.
