With nearly a decade of professional experience, James Atkins is a project architect who brings acute attention to detail and a mindfulness about the human scale of architecture to every project. Originally from Montgomery, AL, he became fascinated by the built environment at an early age, seeing architecture as both an art and a science. Of the many spaces he has designed at VMDO, he most enjoys designing spaces for the performing arts and technical education.

For his VMDO Travel Fellowship, James combined his passions for design and music into a study of aural architecture, aspects of a space that are experienced by listening. He traveled to Berlin, Germany, to study how spatial acoustics affects our experience of performance spaces and sites of remembrance.