About

WaCa Design is a collaborative studio founded in New York City in 2017 by Walter Cain.

WaCa is pursuing experimental design focused on low-embodied carbon building materials.  Buildings are frequently designed for low carbon consumption during occupancy, but construction materials for these buildings have heavy carbon footprints. Using a cradle-to-cradle framework and locally-sourced materials, WaCa aspires to develop low-embodied carbon buildings which are beautiful, comfortable, and unique to their sites.

Walter is a NY-State licensed architect providing architectural services through Walter Cain Design Architecture PLLC, frequently collaborating with other designers project-by-project. Current and former collaborators include Karla Karwas (founder and principal of Raeven Architecture PLLC), Chad Murphy (founder and principal of SOON Architecture Studio), Julia Kosciuk (Julia Kosciuk Arquiteta), Paul Michael Graves (visual artist and free-lance designer), Michael Lu, Morgan Ruth Parrish, Helena Pestana, William Ramsay Rose and Vera Montare Savory.

Walter is pursuing architecture as a second career, following a successful career in investment management.  He received a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 2015 and his NY State architecture license in 2023.  Before founding WaCa, he worked at ORE Design + Technology in Brooklyn, where he was project manager for Project Farmhouse, an interior buildout of a multi-use event space for GrowNYC near Union Square in Manhattan.  He was also a project manager at Raeven Architecture, based in the lower Hudson Valley. In his previous professional life, he was a partner at private equity firm Lexington Partners, where he co-founded and managed the Co-Investment Partners series of funds.  Prior to Lexington, he ran the private equity portfolio at GM Investment Management in New York City.  He holds an MBA in finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in English from College of Charleston in South Carolina.

WaCa’s project in Brazil was featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2025. The 2018 DEMO-DEMO pop-up art experiencing featuring demolition material was featured in Gothamist and is the subject of a short documentary video.

CONTACT                                 walter@waltercain.com

One Rockland Road, Piermont, NY  10968