David Shanks knew at twelve that he would be an architect. Two buildings in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of his Dallas childhood settled it: a glass-walled modern house designed by the architect Donald Jarvis, whose wife happened to be his Cub Scout den mother, and the Neo-Gothic auditorium of Cliff Temple Baptist Church, where he and his wife Susan grew up and still worship today. One taught him what a building could dare to be; the other, what a building could mean to the people who gather inside it. The distance between those two ideas — daring and belonging — is the territory he has worked in ever since. 

His path through the profession ran through a series of Dallas firms, culminating in long years at a practice known nationally for church design, where he became a principal, then director of design, then president. Along the way, churches kept finding him — a thread he never set out to follow but came to regard as a calling. He learned the work from every side, including a stretch representing the owner rather than the architect, which left him with a lasting respect for what a building costs, takes, and asks of everyone who commissions one. 

In 2006, settled and successful, he left to start something of his own. Not out of restlessness, but conviction: he believed a firm could be more — more innovative, more connected to its city, more deliberate about the communities its buildings serve. Shanks Architects opened with a single major commission and has grown, over twenty years, into a multi-studio practice spanning worship, memorial, civic, learning, and interior design — while never letting go of the church clients who built it. 

He remains, by his own cheerful admission, old school. A good day is one when everyone shows up at the office. Away from the drawing board, he can usually be found driving one of his Corvettes, sketching, or reading. What ties all of it together is a single question he wishes every client would ask him first.