Senior Project Architect and Associate Mary Ellen Wolf began her career at Schmidt Associates as an intern, and more than 38 years later, she’s the second-longest-tenured person at the firm. In that time, she has watched Schmidt Associates grow from the 11 people she interned alongside to more than 150 today, worked on over 200 projects along the way, and traded a HB pencil for programs like AutoCAD and Revit. Few people at the firm have seen that much of its history firsthand.

AN INTERN’S VIEW

As an intern, Mary Ellen had the opportunity to work on the iconic Soldiers & Sailors Monument, climbing the exterior scaffolding surrounding it during restoration work and, at one point, standing inside the monument lower level before its exterior limestone stairs had been put back on. Most visitors will only ever know the monument as a finished, walkable landmark. Mary Ellen got to see it hollowed out to its core, open air where a stairwell should be.

She also helped take the Schmidt Associates letters down from the side of the Hammond Block building as transitions happened and participated in the firm’s move to its new home on Mass Ave. It was a preview of what was ahead: a career spent watching this firm change around her.

What kept her at Schmidt Associates wasn’t a five-year plan. She liked the people. She liked being downtown. She found a welcoming group with more kinds of work to try than she expected, and she never found a reason to leave.

ALL FOR ONE

Ask Mary Ellen what’s stayed consistent at Schmidt Associates across four decades of technological and organizational change, and she doesn’t point to a system or a service line. She points to the culture. “We are good at hiring people that have a good attitude, that are team players, that are connected to the culture,” she says. It’s a contrast, in her view, to an industry where people often move from firm to firm chasing whatever’s next elsewhere. At Schmidt Associates, she says, people are more interested in building the next best thing right where they are.

It’s a philosophy she traces back to Wayne Schmidt himself, whose habit of looking at what’s next, rather than settling into what the firm had already accomplished, set a tone of forward motion that has shaped the firm’s leadership ever since. That servant leadership means listening to the client and to each other to discover the right path forward. All for one and one for all, as she puts it: a philosophy the firm has tried to live by since its earliest years, and one Mary Ellen carries into every project and every person she mentors along the way.

PARTNER. PROJECT MANAGER. ARCHITECT.

From a young age, Mary Ellen always knew she wanted to be an architect. She designed not just a dollhouse, but a townhouse, for her Barbies, and really didn’t think about another career after that.

In her decades at Schmidt Associates, Mary Ellen has gotten to make her biggest impact in more than one role. Most architects climb toward a single fixed title and stay there. Mary Ellen has done something different: she was a partner at the firm at one point, and a project manager at another, before landing in her current role as a project architect, where she feels she does her best work.

“You can really find your own path here. There’s a great opportunity to step back and figure out exactly what you want to do.”

Mary Ellen Wolf

She’s taken advantage of that freedom more than most people get the chance to. Few firms give people room to try on that many roles, and fewer people take them up on it more than once.

Mary Ellen is also committed to creating environments where everyone on a project feels valued and empowered to contribute: Owners, educators, administrators, and the people who use the space long after the design team moves on.

The PROJECTS THAT STUCK

Among the many projects she’s worked on, two in particular still come up when Mary Ellen talks about her career.

Hoosier Energy Headquarters. Project Architect. Her first brand-new corporate headquarters, built alongside a sophisticated client and team of engineers on a project that had to perform as hard as it looked good. It achieved LEED Gold certification. She still describes it as one of the more fun projects of her career, less for the finished building than for the collaboration it took to get there, architects and engineers working every system through together until it matched the ambition behind it.

Ivy Tech Corporate College and Culinary Center. Project Architect. A former hotel, once frequented by guests that reportedly included Elvis Presley, reimagined into nine teaching kitchens, a working restaurant, and flexible community classrooms. Mary Ellen still tells the building’s history to anyone who’ll listen. It’s the kind of project she says she’d like to see more of, one where a forgotten building gets a second life.

Along the way, she’s also had the chance to work on project after project in K-12 education, spaces built for students first. She still means it when she says it’s fun to attend a building’s dedication and hear people’s excitement about a place that used to just be drawings on her desk.

THE RESPECT SHE’S EARNED

Kevin Shelley, chief operations officer at Schmidt Associates, has watched Mary Ellen’s influence extend well past her own project list.

“Mary Ellen is a great technical architect, the kind that younger staff model themselves after. She was a big part of the team that established our foundational knowledge of K-12 design, and she’s well respected by our consultant teams and contractors.”

Kevin Shelley, chief operations officer

That kind of respect doesn’t come from title or visibility. It comes from the quiet reliability of someone whose technical judgment other people build on without a second thought. It’s the same instinct that shows up in her own description of the job: recognizing the energy educators bring into their buildings, and doing the work of translating what they envision into something that holds up.

Legacy, one project at a time

The same certainty that led Mary Ellen to build a townhouse for her Barbies as a kid never really left her. What’s changed is everything around it: the pencil that gave way to programs like AutoCAD and Revit, and the different roles she’s tried and grown into along the way.

What she’s left behind isn’t a single role or a single building. It’s a firm’s foundational knowledge of how to design for students, a bench of younger architects who learned their technical instincts by watching hers, and a standing example of what nearly four decades at one firm can look like. As Schmidt Associates marks 50 years, Mary Ellen’s own story, from taking the firm’s letters down off a building on Mass Ave to helping build the firm’s expertise in K-12 design, is a reminder that some of the best legacies are built slowly, one role and one project at a time. We’re proud that she’s spent 38 of those years with us, and even prouder to call her a colleague.