Landry Bado

Dynamic designer: Landry Bado

School/College: Tyler School of Art and Architecture
Degree/Year: BS, architecture, 2018
Hometown: Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
Current Job Title: Project manager
Current Employer: Damon Liss Design

Designing beautiful interior spaces in Manhattan is the easy part for Landry Bado, TYL ’18. A creative since childhood, Landry revels in the artistic opportunities he finds among his design firm’s high-end clientele, where few options are off the table. Instead, the hard part was constructing his life as an openly gay immigrant to the United States after arriving in 2014 as a 17-year-old who spoke little English.

Leap of faith. Landry attended a French-speaking primary school in his West African homeland of Burkina Faso. Many peers attended universities in France (or other French-speaking countries). But a close family friend lived in New Jersey and spoke highly of Temple. Desiring an adventure and a chance to learn English, he enrolled and flew to the U.S. without ever having visited.

Landry Bado stands against a structure in Manhattan.

Going pro. During his senior year, Landry interned with Temple University’s Department of Space Management, now Facilities Information Resources and Management, an office overseeing the university’s buildings and their interiors. It was there he obtained his first real-world experience in design and planning. Shortly after graduation, a fellow Tyler graduate connected him with his first job at Manhattan-based firm SPG Architects.

An eye for design. Landry has now completed dozens of projects in his seven years as a professional architect, specializing in interior designs. His typical clientele are New York City-based apartment owners, but his work has also taken him further afield. His favorite project: a Palm Springs house whose owner asked for an interior overhaul in midcentury modern, his favorite architectural style.

Photography by Ryan S. Brandenberg

Stranger in a strange land. Culture shock was an initial challenge for Landry upon arriving in Philadelphia. But he found his footing at Temple’s Center for American Language and Culture, where he took full-time courses in reading, writing and speaking, as well as electives.

After matriculating into Tyler, Landry found community all over campus. He valued his close-knit cohort in the architecture program, where he and fellow students regularly took the same classes and studied together. On Temple’s diverse campus, he also felt comfortable coming out as gay, which he says is still a cultural taboo in Burkina Faso. He joined student group Queer People of Color and later wrote about his experiences in an essay for Out in Architecture, a book bringing visibility to the voices and experiences of LGBTQIA+ architects and designers.

“I’m very proud to have written an essay for Out in Architecture, a book acknowledging there are a lot of LGBTQ+ people in our profession. It felt like a culmination of my experience moving here, going to Temple and coming out.”

—Landry Bado
Project manager