Tell us about the journey of working as a sole proprietor at Jeffrey Charles Williams Architect to becoming an incorporated firm as Williams | Partners Architects. My work history began while still in school. I spent two summers working in the Seattle area for architects as an intern in the late 1970s. After graduation, I planned to work for the best architects I could in the Seattle area and discover what kind of office suited me. I worked for sole proprietors, mid-sized offices and at one of the largest firms in the world. It was clear to me that in small firms, I would be exposed to more aspects of the process and also, the work was generally on smaller projects that cycled faster. Once I moved to Idaho, I worked for smaller firms but yearned to have the freedom to design on my own. As I started my own business, I worked as a sole proprietor for seven years doing everything from bookkeeping to cleaning the office. It felt cleansing. Those were tough times as well, and I learned that every kind of work kept the office going. Eventually, I needed help with the amount of work that had come my way, and things progressed with a boom about 10 years in, which led to my first experience with partners. The Great Recession came immediately after, and a whole new cycle began. It took another 10 years before I returned to a scenario with partners in the business. How has your career evolved over the years? What I learned during the first 20 years of my business was to provide value to my clients; it wasn’t about me, it was about what I could do for them. But I was always keen to provide more than they expected. Working through many years of tough economy and competition, skills were honed to provide simple and direct projects that reached as far as clients were willing to go. Many budgets limited our ambitions, but we could still get design awards doing this kind of thing. Lately, clients and the economy have changed, ambitions have changed, but we still strive to provide sensible design and seek sensible clients for work that fits with context and environment. What career accomplishment are you proudest of? Over the years, we have created a number of projects we are very proud of. One constant over the years is that we never decide what a project should be at one moment early in the design process. It’s more like carving a shape out of a chunk of wood, modifying the shape as you discover more of the nature of the piece of wood you are working on. Knots, shifts in grain direction force you to rethink the outcome so that in the end, you are surprised but satisfied with the result. In our world of digital media, new and innovative imagery of design solutions are spread around the world instantly. Fads become worldwide within a short period of time, and buildings in Idaho look like buildings anywhere in the world. It can be intoxicating, as I mentioned before, but we are proud of building projects that reflect context, environment and the client as much as possible. The building becomes linked to its place in Idaho, then to broader influences. 13
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