Remembering Heather Roberge, 1971-2026

In 2006, Heather Roberge offered a special assignment to her UCLA Architecture and Urban Design students. They were to transform Perloff Hall’s Decafe—a multipurpose space at the heart of the department’s cultural life—with felt and some metal fasteners.

Roberge guided the class through a careful, craft-driven process: meticulous, sensitive, and hands-on. With exacting measurements and precise detailing at edges and seams, students layered an expansive, rhythmic landscape of felt across Decafe’s walls and ceiling.

Roberge had inspired the student team to produce a new atmosphere out of simple materials and their bare hands, opportunity out of constraint. Twenty years later, their project still greets the AUD community in Decafe.

This was the sort of craft, experimentation, and mentorship that defined Roberge’s legacy at UCLA AUD and beyond.

Heather Lynn Roberge, an architect and longtime educator, passed away on September 20, 2026 in Los Angeles. She was 55.

Roberge first taught at UCLA AUD in 2000 as a visiting assistant professor; she was appointed lecturer in 2002. She would go on to direct the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program from 2007 to 2016, and was appointed Chair in 2017, a role she held until 2020, leading AUD through the Covid-19 pandemic. Roberge had served on UCLA AUD’s Senate Faculty since then, promoted from Associate Professor to Professor in 2022.

Colleagues and students alike knew her as a rigorous and generous teacher, someone who pushed people to think more expansively about what buildings could be while remaining deeply attentive to craft, detail, and innovation. Just this year, she was named AIA Los Angeles's 2026 Educator of the Year.

"Heather held a special place in our community," says Mariana Ibañez, Chair of UCLA AUD. "For countless students and colleagues, what mattered most was who she was in the studio and the classroom: a mentor who was endlessly curious, and unwavering in her belief in her students. Her passing is an enormous loss for so many in our community."

"Heather was an extraordinary architect and a dedicated educator who helped shape the intellectual life of the department and inspired generations of students," says Lionel Popkin, Dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, who served as Chair of the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance while Roberge was Chair of AUD. "For our community, and especially for those of us who studied or worked closely with Heather, this is a profound loss."

"Heather was a stalwart friend, a ferocious thinker, and an ingenious designer," says David Erdman, Professor at Pratt School of Architecture, and a classmate of Roberge’s from Ohio State University. "Heather’s students, whom she nurtured (and challenged), are among the leaders of the discipline today. Her colleagues admired her rigor, standards, and expectations. She was an optimist and believer that design mattered."

Roberge was born in Covington, Kentucky, on April 2, 1971. She grew up in Westerville, Ohio, and earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Architecture degrees at The Ohio State University, where she received the AIA Certificate of Excellence and graduated summa cum laude. As a freshman engineering major, she enrolled in introductory architecture courses; inspired, she applied to the architecture program.

Roberge founded her design practice, Murmur, in Los Angeles in 2008, and over nearly two decades built a body of work defined by its curiosity about materials, computation, and craft. Projects like “Succulent House” and “En Pointe” reflect an approach to architecture that, not unlike her upgrade of Perloff Decafe, was as much about experimentation and atmosphere as it was about form.

In 2025, Roberge published Fabricating Plasticity in Aluminum, demonstrating her fascination with material, manufacturing, and geometry, as well as creating unexpected spaces and experiences from simple materials. The book’s cover depicts “En Pointe,” a group of aluminum columns poised on blade-like fulcrums that, in turn, create new, curious spaces below. To achieve a balanced state, Roberge distributed the mass and silhouette of each column to stabilize its neighboring columns; while unstable individually, the columns enter a state of poise when grouped together.

Roberge’s work earned her major recognitions, including the 2016 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York and multiple AIA design honors.

"Among the many ways in which Heather touched me profoundly was her insistence that we actually conduct research at one of the world’s great research institutions," says Neil Denari, Distinguished Professor at UCLA AUD, who served as interim chair before Roberge’s appointment as chair. "This means not simply practicing or honing a craft, of perfecting accepted knowledge. It means working with doubt, conjecture, and risk. I will always be grateful for this and everything else she taught me."

"There are colleagues whose presence within a school extends far beyond the courses they teach or the students they mentor; they become part of its intellectual conscience. Heather was such a person," says Narineh Mirzaeian, Lecturer at UCLA AUD. "She understood that teaching at its best is both an intellectual and deeply human exchange: an act of challenging someone while also giving them the confidence and space to grow. I will deeply miss our conversations about architecture and design, about teaching and the questions that preoccupied us, and inevitably, about life itself."

Roberge’s influence will be felt for decades to come: in the buildings and spaces she designed, in the students she guided, and in an institution she helped define.

Roberge is survived by her husband, David Gale; her son, Finnian James Payne; her mother, Patricia Ann Roberge (née Sears); her sister, Melanie Roberge Ortlieb, and her husband, Mike Ortlieb; her sisters-in-law Robin Lorber and her husband, Izzy Lorber, Susan Gale, and Lauren Napach and her husband, Joel Napach; and her nieces and nephews, Will Ortlieb, Jake Lorber, Amanda Lorber, Ian Napach, Lily Napach, and Ava Napach. She was predeceased by her father, Jerome George Roberge Jr.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Ohio State University’s Heather L. Roberge Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Fund, established to support future generations of architecture students.

If you wish to submit a tribute to Heather for UCLA AUD’s forthcoming tribute page, please email it to travis.dagenais@aud.ucla.edu, including your name as you would like it to appear.