Schade and Bolender Architects

small-firms committee of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
   She has done this work well, so well that she was named this year's outstanding young architect by local AIA chapter. "I slipped under the wire," admits Schade, who turned 39 in March.
   This spring, Schade doubled the size of her practice by forming a partnership with her friend Christine "Kiki" Bolender.
   It's a good thing they get along so well. In their modest office on the first floor of a townhouse on the 2100 block of Locust Street, the partners face each other across a big desk. Part of the idea, Schade said, is that they become "interchangeable"- when one partner is tending to family matters, the other can step in for clients.
   Jerseys with the name of the new firm emblazoned on the back hang on one wall- they "advertised" their new partnership by sponsoring a kids' soccer team in the Fairmount League.
   "People tend to think of architects with an ascot and a cape, like in the Dewar's

ads," said Schade. "We're actually pretty hard-working, underpaid, fun people."
   Paul M. Hirshorn, head of the architecture department at Drexel and the man who nominated Schade for the Young Architects Award, has called her work "sensitive, meticulous and beautiful."
   The description could apply to Schade's latest project, a house she designed for her godmother on Orr's Island, Maine.
   It was her first "from-the-bottom-up" project- as opposed to renovation of an existing building- and she takes obvious pride in it. Like a mother with a first born.
   Unlike a mother, she had only indirect control. As always, it was the client who called many of the shots. In this case, the client wanted a small house with sparse ornamentation that melded with the landscape, a stretch of land overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
   Schade responded with a design that included cedar shingles, red cedar siding and a forest-green steel roof. Over time, the cedar siding will weather, the house will fade into its setting. It will look as if it had always been there.