Architect Austin Dingwall Wants Every New Building to Belong Here

If you care about how Vero Beach looks and feels a decade from now, the unhurried scale along Ocean Drive, the way a new home on Cardinal meets the street, the quiet block off 14th that still reads unmistakably as Vero, the name Austin Dingwall is worth knowing.

Dingwall is the principal of Dingwall Architecture and is active in AIA Treasure Coast. He holds graduate degrees in architecture, urban planning, and building construction, a background that shapes how he thinks about buildings not as isolated objects but as participants in the places they occupy. His firm designs homes in neighborhoods like Riomar, Windsor, and the island communities, with colleagues Nicolas Glenn and Jaime Moscoso helping bring those projects from concept through construction, always with an eye on how each house will read from the street, not just from inside the front door.

What Dingwall brings to AIA Treasure Coast is less a signature style than a consistent standard. Mediterranean, transitional, Florida Cracker, mid-century modern, the appropriate vocabulary can shift with the neighborhood and the client. What cannot shift, in his view, is respect for context and scale. He describes his role as something closer to a curator of Vero Beach's architectural character: not someone who freezes the town in amber, but someone who insists that whatever gets added here actually belongs here.

AIA Treasure Coast can't single-handedly preserve the character of a growing coastal community, and it doesn't claim to. What the chapter can do, and what Dingwall's leadership is pointed toward, is hold a line on professional standards that align with what residents already value: human scale, streets that feel lived-in, neighborhoods that weren't built all at once and don't look like it. The organization actively invites public participation in those conversations. When AIA Treasure Coast opens a program or a design forum to the community, showing up matters. The people who love this place should be in the room.

Learn more about Dingwall Architecture at dingwallarchitecture.com. For AIA Treasure Coast programs and statewide initiatives, visit aiafla.org.

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Ava Cook

Community Manager at Vero Vine

Hello!
My name is Ava Cook and I am a Freshman at Florida Southern College in Lakeland FL. I am currently a B.F.A musical theatre major with a minor in Business Administration. I love reading, singing, acting, dancing, and writing. My favorite part about Vero Beach and Indian River County as a whole is how close the community is. Vero Vine is important to me as it allows me to do my part it bringing the community together also, sharing events, small businesses, and other local happenings. If you have any questions or any recommendations for me, my email is always open [email protected].