Ryan Buckel
When you’re planning a remodel or addition, a good-looking design isn’t enough. You need someone who understands your existing home, how you want to live, and how every decision from the roofline to the driveway affects the result. That’s what Ryan brings to TDS Design Build.
Ryan brings years of experience teaching architecture, engineering, woodworking, and design to his work as architectural designer at TDS Design Build. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, earned his Master of Architecture from Southern Illinois University, and has spent his career moving between the classroom, the drafting table, and the shop.
Designing Homes For Real Life
Ryan’s interest has always been the residential scale, homes, porches, additions, and the details that make a house belong to its neighborhood and the people in it. His true passion is designing homes where people can live their best lives.
Building skyscrapers isn’t really my jam. My true passion is designing homes where people can live their best lives.”
Ryan Buckel
Architectural Designer
A Design-Build Mindset
Alongside his design work, Ryan taught high school architecture, automotive technology, engineering, and woodworking, and still teaches college architecture part-time. Fittingly, his office at the school is in the shop, where his students build models and sheds.
That connection between drawing and building is what drew him to design-build. A good design can’t just work on paper. It has to be buildable, and it has to hold up through the hundred decisions between the first site measure and the finished project.
Having taught woodworking and architecture, everything has come full circle for me. Design-build is exactly where I belong.”
Ryan Buckel
Architectural Designer
Helping Home Additions Feel Like They Belong
For his master’s thesis, Ryan designed a college dormitory, but the real question behind it was how new buildings should relate to old ones. His design bridged Bloomington-Normal’s century-old character and students’ modern needs, rather than drawing a hard line between the two.
This type of project connects with his remodeling design work in Madison, where most additions join a home with its own history, in a neighborhood with a strong sense of place. Ryan studies a home before changing it, reviewing what already exists, what’s worth preserving, and how the whole property works together from the exterior architecture to the grading, driveway, and landscaping. New work should add value without erasing the character that made the home appealing in the first place.
You need someone who understands your existing home, how you want to live, and how every decision from the roofline to the driveway affects the result. That’s what Ryan brings to TDS Design Build.
What Ryan Is Working On at TDS
For a recent TDS project, a second-story addition that will turn an existing balcony into a new primary bedroom, Ryan built a full CAD model covering all three floors, the garage, the landscape, and the site plan. That level of detail is his standard, not the exception. Every project gets a complete picture of the home and site before design decisions are made.
Ryan focuses on exterior design while interior designer Erin Lynett leads the interiors, so every project gets dedicated design attention inside and out.
Inspired by Chicago Architecture
Ryan’s interest in architecture started early. As a kid, he and his mom went to Open House Chicago every year, exploring the buildings the Chicago Architecture Center opens to the public. On one visit to the Museum of Science and Industry (a trip for the building, not the exhibits) he saw a photograph of the White City and learned the museum was one of the last major surviving buildings from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. He’s been studying the fair ever since, and Daniel Burnham, its master planner, is still his favorite architect.
Off the Clock
Outside of architecture, Ryan’s world is music. He photographs live music, plays guitar, and produces his own tracks. He lives just east of the Capitol and is getting to know Madison one architectural detail at a time.
Fun Facts About Ryan
World’s Fair Scholar
Ryan can tell you exactly what survives from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, including a ticket booth now living out its retirement as a garden shed in an Oak Park backyard.
He’s Taught It All
Architecture, automotive technology, engineering, woodworking, and photography. If it was in the tech ed wing, Ryan has probably taught it.
Event Photographer
Ryan spends his summers behind a camera at outdoor music events, shooting live shows as part of a music journalism team.
Why Ryan Is a Natural Fit for TDS Design Build
A successful remodel starts with understanding the whole picture: the home, the site, the neighborhood, and the people who live there. Ryan designs that way by instinct. He’s a teacher who never stopped being a student, and a designer who knows how things get built.
Whether he’s modeling an entire property or working out how a second-story addition should sit on an older home, he brings the same belief to the work: architecture is for people, and the best homes are designed around real life.
