Cailin Nikel-Zueger '08

Biography

An avid proponent of walkable cities, Cailin is a designer and illustrator with extensive experience working with leading offices of contemporary traditional urbanism in the USA and Germany. Most recently, Cailin worked with Christoph Kohl Stadtplaner Architekten in Berlin, designing mixed-use master plans that unite traditional European urbanism with forward-thinking ecological concepts like green infrastructure, gondola transit systems, and urban agriculture. Prior to her time in Germany, Cailin worked with Opticos Design in Berkeley, CA, in projects spanning the full spectrum of architecture, urban design, and planning, including “missing middle housing” design, neighborhood master plans, downtown revitalization strategies, and form-based regional planning.

Cailin has practiced urban design in an expansive range of scales and site contexts: from rural crossroads to high-rise downtown redevelopment areas, and from repairing suburban corridors to designing new city quarters. Particularly through the 30 charrettes that she helped facilitate with Opticos, Cailin also gained an interdisciplinary perspective on rethinking the contemporary city, collaborating with thought-leading specialists in walkable urbanism, ranging from transportation and parking planners to sustainability engineers and urban economists. Her professional work also regularly includes hand drawing, experimentally integrating hand rendering with digital tools to maximize effect and efficiency. In 2018, Cailin’s professional accomplishment was recognized with the international Award for Emerging Excellence in the Classical Tradition, sponsored by the ICAA, INTBAU, and The Prince’s Foundation.

In addition to professional practice, Cailin is committed to research, receiving her 2018 master’s degree in architectural history and theory at the University of California-Berkeley. She also earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 2008 from the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century urban development history and theory, architectural historiography and the role of environment in architectural aesthetics, and climatic adaptations of traditional urban housing. In 2008-09, Cailin received a Fulbright Fellowship to document traditional courtyard housing in India, where she supported local heritage-advocacy groups in Ahmedabad in preparation for their bid to become India’s first World Heritage City.