DShelped, and I taught at the University of Utah for 22 years. Let’s talk about the evolution of your career. While pursuing a master’s degree, I worked first at a local Fort Worth firm, and then at the DFW Airport as a Project Architect. I wanted to have construction administration experience, and I worked both on and off the airport campus on multiple major works. I worked on the American Airlines Corporate Headquarters and the restoration of their Southern Reservations Office Building and flight simulators. Were you teaching? During the last year and a half, I taught at the University of Texas at Arlington. I was teaching construction documents, just like I did later at the University of Utah. When I graduated, I went to Dallas to Foster Meyer Architects for about five years. Because I was quick on the boards when we drew with our hands and I wanted to do construction administration as well, I changed offices and went to HKS. I knew it was a big architectural firm, and I knew I wanted to work in a large firm. I had some other friends who had intern jobs working at smaller architectural firms, and it just didn’t seem interesting to work on house repairs, roof repairs and restroom upgrades. I wanted to work on big buildings. I wanted to work on large structures. HKS was, at the time, the largest architectural firm in Texas. It was a little bit daunting; there were about 160 people. I didn’t want to get lost in the crowd, but I have been at HKS ever since. It’s been about 40 years. Were there mentors there? Oh, very much so. HKS is very collaborative. When I started, I could walk into any one of my project managers’ or principals’ offices, ask some questions, and always get the help I needed. There were a handful of mentors that have now retired. I still talk with them. I still look up to them as good friends and good men. Different mentors taught me different things. Joe Buskuhl was a project manager before he became HKS president. I was his project architect. We worked on a 30-story corporate office building for Greyhound Dial in Phoenix. I learned from Joe that you don’t do the work unless you have a contract. We were in a contract negotiation, and I was surprised at how he spoke to the owner, “Yes, we’ll do this work, but this is our contract. This is what we need to have.” And the owner kept pushing him off. Joe was basically saying, “We’re good businessmen. We’re not going to do the work until we have a contract. That’s just good business. You’re a good businessman. So are we.” My first president at HKS, Ron Brame, said, “We’re in the business of architecture. And if you don’t do the business properly, you don’t get to do the architecture.” Those were two very, very good mentors. “We love being architects, but let’s get the paperwork done first. And once we do that, then we’re on good ground.” How did you become a specialist? I was a generalist when I joined HKS. Now we’ve grown to 1,700 employees worldwide. When I joined, it was a single office in Dallas, and we’ve migrated 7
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