Designing a Career with Purpose: Eric Abeln’s Path to Partnership

In November of 2025, Eric J. Abeln will be celebrating his 19th year with Heights Venture. Nearly two decades ago, Eric’s journey with Heights Venture humbly started with a fourth-year Architecture student internship facilitated by the semester-long internship program within Kansas State University’s degree program.  Upon graduation in 2007, Eric was awarded a full-time position at Heights Venture. Over the next 5 years, he had the exciting opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects across a few building types with a skilled, knowledgeable, and mentorship-minded leadership team.

The adaptive reuse and redevelopment projects Eric worked on in his early career years still hold a special place in his portfolio as some of the most rewarding and challenging. Trying to realize the client’s vision while navigating existing condition constraints is a difficult but rewarding experience for a young architectural professional. These projects simultaneously nurtured his problem-solving nature and developed and honed a win-win approach to the problem-solving process.

Family moved Eric from Houston, Texas, to the Chicago suburbs in 2012. Eric’s request to resign was not accepted, as the Heights Venture Leadership knew he had a bright future ahead of him and believed he was too much of an asset to allow him to leave. Eric was instead allowed to work remotely long before working remotely was a common practice in the Architecture profession.

Eric is thankful for that foresight and vision as he continued to work his way up the leadership ladder of Heights Venture, culminating in his elevation to Principal in 2017 and Partner in 2021. In an era of job hopping for promotions, Eric is proud to represent a seemingly outdated model where loyalty and long-term trust are rewarded with the opportunity for personal and professional growth. It is Eric’s goal to reciprocate the same loyalty, trust, and opportunity afforded to him through his career at HV to those existing and new members of the Heights Venture family and continue that legacy established by the first and current leaders of Heights Venture.

In early 2024, Eric officially opened the Chicagoland branch office of Heights Venture. The establishment of an official base of operations in the Chicagoland area was not only a strategic positioning of resources for existing clients but reaffirmed Eric’s personal mission to support and serve his personal and professional family with presence, understanding, patience, and humility.

Eric firmly believes in the office environment for the Architectural profession and the studio environment for collaboration, mentorship, and relationship building. Without these components, we become more and more operators of machines and less designers, less tuned into and sympathetic toward the human condition.

Eric is optimistic about the success of Heights Venture’s newest branch and is eager to work towards further expansion in personnel, clients served, and the market sectors we are active in. With full support from the sister offices in Houston and Dallas, the entire Partnership is confident that Heights Venture will continue helping our clients realize their vision for many years to come.