Veronica Santoro

### Overview

Veronica Santoro was a Strombian architect. She is most well known for her work under the original communist Strombi regime, being the main architect behind the original mid-rise skyline of Claretto. She also was the main architect designing buildings in West Clarkton, which consists of buildings now dominating Clarkton, Ypsidavia's skyline. She also designed buildings in Turangrad, Dovena, then a part of North Kuzavia. These were mid-rise buildings, almost the same as the ones in Claretto.

After her work in Strombi, she moved to Dovena and worked for DBCD, becoming one of its most notable architects.

### Early Life

Santoro was born to a dysfunctional family in Claretto, Strombi. Her parents were the first generation to arrive on this world on the Strombian colonization ship. To escape from her tumultuous family life, she would often venture out, observing the early construction of Strombi. This ignited her passion for architecture.

### Education

Santoro was trained as an architect at a government-run Strombian college. This college was run directly by the Strombi Communist Party.

### Career

Her earliest works were in Strombi, building multi-family residences. She gained widespread recognition and credentials by doing this. When a competition was held to select the housing block designs for Claretto, hers was chosen as the best option.

After West Clarkton in Ypsidavia became a private compound, she was among the first to move there, incentivized by the Strombian government. There, using limited resources, she led the construction of its well-known housing blocks. After West Clarkton declared independence, she continued her work there, making it her home. Once the Clarkton War broke out, she fled to Dovena. There, she got a job at the Dovena Brutalist Construction Division (DBCD), which was then a Dovenese state-owned construction firm. After the rise of Ceren Dovena, she worked with DBCD under the Ceren government to build up public housing in Prescott. During the First Ceren War, DBCD was tasked with building pillboxes and fortifications around Dovena. Santoro travelled around Dovena to observe these fortifications being built, in her effort to learn how to design them. It was a stroke of luck that she was in Dovenese-occupied Najima, observing the construction of fortifications, when Weisendorf and Ypsidavia performed a nuclear attack on Prescott as part of Operation Stormcoat. This saved her life, as the DBCD office in Prescott, as well as her home, was destroyed in the attack.

### Brief Career Hiatus

Tragically, her home in Prescott was also destroyed in the attack, killing her son, and her sister who was then taking care of her son. Her husband Mario Santoro, who was then in the Ceren Military, went missing following the war. As a result of this tragedy, Santoro took a break from her job at DBCD and moved back to Strombi. During this time, she lived with her cousins in a Strombian public housing building that she had designed years ago.

### Later Career

Years later, DBCD invited her back to their firm. At this point, DBCD had become a private company operated under Feldstein. She accepted the offer, and her first job was to help design the University of Ypsidavia. She had a major impact on the overall design of the university, and she steered the design to its now well-known bare concrete utilitarian style.

Her work designing the university paid well, and citing mental health problems, she decided to retire from architecture for the foreseeable future.

She wouldn't come back to architecture until she was in her 80s.

Her last ever work was shortly before her death, when she decided to accept an offer to design a new mid-rise building in Clarkton. This was a joint construction project between the Strombian government and the Ypsidavian government. Soon after submitting her blueprints for the building, she was hospitalized following a heart attack. Construction of the building started while she was in the hospital.

### Death

Veronica Santoro died at the Clarkton Central Hospital at the age of 97 due to complications from a heart attack. She didn't live to see the completion of her last project.