lit a candle 1h agookay so this is not even my field at all, I'm not an architect, I just followed a design blog years ago that kept posting the Succulent House and I saved like six photos of it to my phone because I was redoing my own tiny apartment and wanted that same feeling somehow, and I never even knew her name until today when I saw it was the same person, Heather Roberge, and she taught at UCLA for twenty plus years too which I didn't know, and now I'm just sitting here scrolling old screenshots. 55 is nothing. anyway. sorry, rambling, I just didn't expect to feel this about someone I only knew through a blog
Their story
Heather L. Roberge was an American architect and educator whose practice and teaching explored how digital tools, new materials and fabrication methods could reshape architectural form and space. Based in Los Angeles, she founded the design studio Murmur and spent more than two decades on the faculty of UCLA Architecture…
Heather L. Roberge was an American architect and educator whose practice and teaching explored how digital tools, new materials and fabrication methods could reshape architectural form and space. Based in Los Angeles, she founded the design studio Murmur and spent more than two decades on the faculty of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, including a term as department chair through the early COVID-19 years.
Born on 2 April 1971 in Covington, Kentucky, she grew up in Westerville, Ohio. At The Ohio State University she earned a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, summa cum laude, and a Master of Architecture. After early professional work at Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, Davis Brody Bond, Architecture Research Office and Eisenman Architects, she co-founded the experimental practice Gnuform (1999 to 2006). In 2008 she established Murmur, which became known for technically adventurous residential and installation work that treated computation and craft as partners rather than opposites.
Her built and exhibited projects included the Succulent House, which received a 2011 AIA Next LA design merit award, and En Pointe, an installation for the SCI-Arc Gallery that earned a 2015 AIA Los Angeles Merit Award and later appeared at Ohio State's Banvard Gallery. In 2016 the Architectural League of New York named her an Emerging Voice. She also wrote Fabricating Plasticity in Aluminum, extending her research on material performance into print. Coverage of her work appeared in Architectural Record, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and other outlets.
Roberge joined the UCLA faculty in 2002, directed the undergraduate Architectural Studies program, and chaired the department from 2017 to 2020. Colleagues and students remembered her as a demanding, quietly determined teacher who pushed people toward work they had not thought they could do. Recognition followed that side of her career as closely as her practice: the 2017 ACADIA Teaching Award of Excellence, a 2018 Distinguished Alumna honor from Ohio State's College of Engineering, and, in 2026, AIA Los Angeles Educator of the Year, announced weeks before her death and scheduled for presentation in October.
She married David Gale after they met on a blind date in 2008; they recently marked fifteen years of marriage. Their son, Finnian James Payne, was the center of her family life. She lived with melanoma for the final three and a half years of her life and died in Los Angeles on 20 September 2026, aged 55. She was survived by Gale, Finn, her mother Patricia Ann Roberge, her sister Melanie Roberge Ortlieb and a wider circle of in-laws, nieces and nephews. An endowed scholarship in her name at Ohio State was established to support future architecture students.
Biography adapted from Knowlton School memorial and family obituary, Architectural Record, Archinect, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.
Photos
1Heather Roberge
by People Forever
