Ramy founded Atelier ARJ to practise civil engineering the way he believes it should be done: personally, early, and in service of the design. In thirteen years across San Francisco, New York and Lebanon he has engineered parks, plazas, campuses, streetscapes and mixed-use buildings, very often on ground others found too steep, too wet or too constrained to be worth the trouble.

He starts with the site, not the standard detail. On a park built into difficult terrain, he resolved the grading and the structure together and turned the runoff into a stormwater capture system. On a waterfront plaza, he paired its renovation and accessibility upgrades with planning for rising seas. On a university campus, he tested three building locations on steep ground before the design moved forward. Each time, the engineering made room for the idea instead of cutting it back.

His conviction is simple: creative solutions need not be expensive. They need to fit the project and be agreed early with everyone who will review them. That is why Atelier ARJ stays small, and why the engineer at the first conversation is the engineer on the drawings.

Before founding the atelier, Ramy spent nine years at Sherwood Design Engineers, rising from Design Engineer to Senior Project Manager on work that included Levi’s Plaza, Francisco Park and the Cal Poly Student Success Center. He began his career designing grading and drainage in New York and as a site engineer in Lebanon.