Henderson colleague Charlie Erler has graduated twice in recent days: First, at Ranken Technical College and, second, here at HAA. What we mean is, Charlie went from being an intern at Henderson to becoming a full-fledged architectural designer, also while completing his Bachelor of Science in Architecture at Ranken.
Quite a busy and accomplished person, right? Well, there’s much more to Charlie’s background that we’d like to share with you.
You might have seen him recently on Henderson’s Putt for Mutts team, to benefit Found a Hound Rescue of Godfrey, Illinois. Go back several years, however, and you’d most likely have found him on the pitching mound for Alton High School.
This AHS alum elaborated that “My educational background is a little lengthy as the first few years of college were centered around the pursuit of a baseball career.” As an AHS right-handed pitcher, Charlie was ranked in the top 25 in Illinois by Perfect Game while earning an “Extreme Elite Scholar Athlete Award” for maintaining a GPA above 3.5.
Lucky for us, an engineering interest propelled him beyond the baseball diamond: “I got into architecture and design in high school through a string of engineering-based extracurricular classes, finishing with an architectural drafting course in both my junior and senior years.”
Then, after time as a scholar-athlete at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn., Charlie landed at St. Louis’ own Ranken, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in the spring of 2025.
Not only did he arrive at HAA with education in architecture, but Charlie also had experience as an intern/draftsman at a civil-engineering firm and worked at another architecture firm before joining us in August 2023. According to HAA Vice President Ryan Suess, “Charlie has been a consistent, hardworking staff member from day one and is an eager learner. We’ve been able to provide him with opportunities to work on a variety of project types and he continues to advance in knowledge and skill. We are pleased to have him on board and look forward to working with him on our many challenging projects.”
“Charlie has been a consistent, hardworking staff member from day one and is an eager learner. We’ve been able to provide him with opportunities to work on a variety of project types and he continues to advance in knowledge and skill. We are pleased to have him on board and look forward to working with him on our many challenging projects.”
Ryan Suess, Henderson vice president
With a goal of becoming a licensed architect, Charlie feels appreciative of the mentors aplenty at Henderson. “I think that Jamie, Ryan, and Eric have found a great balance of allow the independence to problem-solve without the feeling of someone watching over your shoulder while making themselves available to help if need be.”
Meanwhile, he said he’s also enjoying the “diversity within projects” that he finds in HAA’s residential work. Whereas he focused on commercial projects with his previous employers, finding what he calls a “formidable solution to the design requested by the client” drives Charlie’s work these days. At HAA, you can usually find him pitching in (sorry, we couldn’t resist) to lend a hand to the project architects, including everything from drawing revisions to assisting with field verification.
Balancing his internship—and now his full-time job at HAA—with school was difficult, to be sure, but Charlie developed these skills through his athletics and previous work. Speaking of his athletic career, he said that the “most translative thing about sports is the opportunity to learn how to handle adversity and adapt. . . . I believe these characteristics are very beneficial to have within a field like architecture, or really any construction-oriented field, as it is rarely the case that a project goes as smoothly as initially planned, despite one’s best intentions.”
There is another piece of Charlie Erler’s background that informs his can-do attitude. You see, Charlie hails from Luhansk, a city in the Donbas region of war-torn eastern Ukraine from which he was adopted as a baby. And although he hasn’t lived overseas since then, he said he likely wouldn’t pass up the chance to work internationally as an architect.
Also, like a lot of us here at Henderson, Charlie spends free time outside of work watching the Cardinals, plus a variety of other sports, and, as we alluded earlier, he plays a mean game of golf, too, as you would expect from a former college-level baseball player.
Finally, striving to “learn something new every day while finding new ways to provide value to our team,” means that Charlie Erler is one colleague who’s poised to earn his way into the HAA Hall of Fame someday. Of that, we’re quite confident.