John Taylor ( Jt ) Gorski, AIA, NCARB, NTHP

Cedarburg, WI

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What a pleasure it is to be writing to you, feel free to call me “John” or ‘Jt.”

 

While being a relatively young professional, I am a Registered Architect in the States of Wisconsin, Florida, and Alaska with approximately 7 years of professional working experience.  I am a proud Milwaukee native and I possess three degrees including a Professional Masters Degree from UW-Milwaukee.  I am also NCARB Certified, a member of AIA, and a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

 

My most recent position was at GROTH Design Group in Cedarburg, WI—a mid-sized architecture firm.  There I contributed to the team working on many regional projects across Wisconsin, the Midwest, and Florida.  Those projects ranged from corporate buildings to church renovations, school projects and private condominium developments as well as medical facilities.  At GDG I enjoyed the collaborative nature of working with the other members of the staff, clients, engineers, and other consultants to help progress the project through to completion.  My tasks and duties while at GDG were not limited to but included Building Codes / Life Safety / Permitting, Historic Building Research, Site Analysis, the process of taking drawings from conceptual images all the way through Construction Documents and into Construction Administration.

 

I have over four years of cross-discipline experience working at Novum Structures—a multi-national specialty engineering firm.  There I produced RFP Drawings and assisted project engineers, PE's, and SE's.  Those engineering projects included very high-end structural glass walls, glass fin structures, expressive structurally complex skylights, and exotic canopies for many well known architectural firms and their clients.  At Novum we utilized either point supported, edge clamped, cable supported, or captured glazing systems to achieve the desired project outcome.  The projects I was involved in ranged from places across the entire continental US, the Cayman Islands, Qatar, and plenty across the Canadian countryside.

 

Fresh out of college I worked for Christopher Kidd and Associates, a mid-sized architecture firm.  The work was specialized toward healthcare facilities primarily.  I mostly worked on core / shell and TI projects of medical office buildings including ASC suites, sleep centers, imaging suites, urgent care centers, and various other typologies.

 

During my schooling and through present day I have developed a catalog of eccentric tastes in the profession’s body of work ranging from modest Usonian homes, abrasive Brutalist behemoths, slender and transparent glazed icons of modern commerce, and the forgotten and abused industrial relics that dot the present landscape.  Milwaukee is my home and my birth city.  While the legacy of her shores is rich with commerce and strife, I am quite proud that the various genres of architecture that I have fallen in love with are represented across her meandering borders.  I believe that Milwaukee’s architecture is a history that deserves to be remembered and preserved. I am very interested in old buildings and ecological stewardship, specifically pertaining to grain elevators.  As such, I selected a large grain elevator complex in Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley for my graduate thesis project and rehabilitated it into a Greek Orthodox monastery.

 

When I am not taking in the local heritage and buildings, I very much enjoy tinkering with carpentry and build projects but also with recreational photography, the rare video game night, and the maintenance of my two vehicles.  My “fun car” is a forest green ‘94 Jeep Wrangler-YJ with which I enjoy back-country road trips all the while trying not to lose my mind in the rabbit hole of automotive repairs—however rewarding they end up being.  A final fun fact about me is that I have painstakingly completed the collection of every promotional and commercially released set in the line of LEGO Architecture models.

 

Thank you for your time, I look forward to speaking with you.