Alex was raised on a boat on the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in St. Maarten by sea as a preschooler in the 1980s. Learning that actions on land have a significant impact on the water that surrounds us, Alex followed her passions learning about the built environment. Alex returned to St. Maarten, again by sea, in 2010 after obtaining undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in architecture in the United Kingdom.
While sustainable design and integration with nature has always driven Alex’s architectural practice and research (her postgraduate thesis was on Architecture and Landscape), Irma was the catalyst to encourage Alex to further explore community scale composting, regenerative gardening, and architectural technologies to promote a more resilient future for small island states. When Alex isn’t talking about the benefits of composting or sustainable architecture, you can usually find her underwater somewhere with her kids and sisters, a collection bag in-hand for plastic debris and a camera in-hand to document the flora and fauna for her coloring kit project, “The Island Spark.”