21 I went to work for him for 18 months. For those 18 months, I was hungry to get out and practice architecture because that’s what I really wanted to do. But I became a research assistant, and we did some pretty interesting stuff. We wrote papers for ARPA and worked hand in glove with the computer graphics people. The computer programs applicable to architecture were born. The dream then was to take this to the point where a man building a project could flip down the front of his bib overalls and see exactly what he was assembling and then flip it back up and do it because the thing would exist totally in the computer. We were so far from that. It took 30 years to get where we thought we were going in that research project. Next, I went to work for Edwards and Daniels, and I liked it a lot. I grew to know Ralph Edwards and kind of worked under the wing of Jud Daniels. There were a lot of interesting people in that office, and they were doing some really interesting work. I was there for close to three years. My wife and I bought an old house on Wall Street, which was just south of the Capitol Building, and I started remodeling it. There was a thing called the Women’s Architectural League, and they put our little Wall Street house on a home tour. A lot of people were coming through it, and people responded favorably. We structured the garden like a series of outdoor rooms, and that struck people because you didn’t see much of that in Salt Lake. All of a sudden, I started getting these opportunities to do gardens, and then I got involved in opening the house to the gardens, which lead to a small house remodel. There was a point where I got over my head in debt on the Wall Street house. I was working at Edwards and Daniels during the day, and at night, working on these little garden and remodel projects. One day it dawned on me I was billing a little more on my small projects by working weekends and nights than I was being paid at Edwards and Daniels. I was dealing with my debt on the Wall Street house rather handsomely, and I had more work than I could do. So, I resigned from E&D, and they were fabulous about it. By now, we’d sold the Wall Street house and bought a house that was designed by Kletting, the architect of the Capitol. So here we were in this ancient Kletting house on Paxton Place, and I had the whole basement. I sat down there and drew my little remodel projects and started taking the licensing exam. It took a couple of tries. A good friend from E&D days, John Huish, and I started a little, informal partnership, in a little building he had on Sixth Avenue and G Street. It was an old grocery store, and we started pumping out little houses. We moved into the bigger houses. We had a predominantly residential-based practice, and we’re doing a lot of work in Park City, which was becoming the ski place that it is today. Then, John went one way, I went another, and I opened a small practice with a colleague from E&D. We bought an old building on South State Street, right across from the City and County Building, called the Jenkins Saddlery. There was a small hotel above and the old saddle shop on the bottom. We continued to do houses, and then some bigger projects started coming in that fed off our work in Park City, including the first Kimball Arts Center, which was a modification of a large old gas station whose roots went back to stagecoach times. We moved from that building over to a wonderful old building off Exchange Place built during the First World War as a factory for fur-lined flight suits, although I think they never managed to build a flight suit there. I think the story was that they could never quite agree on anything. We started doing some work in Jackson Hole. That grew into a small satellite office, and I spent a lot of time there. We did a major resort that was housing-based: 385 individual housing sites on the west side of the Snake River near Teton Village. Through Steven Goldsmith, we were introduced to Artspace and became the architects for most of their buildings. They were a superb client. We spent a lot of time on affordable housing projects, and one of the last ones we did was the first affordable housing project that was net zero. What work brought you the most satisfaction? Clearly the affordable housing. I felt like I was doing something other than just fancy houses. We did a lot of fancy houses, over 400 of them. The firm still does wonderful houses for individual clients. Occasionally you found yourself in a situation where you had to finish a project that you didn’t believe in as much, but after all, it was the clients’ house. For the most part, we were able to do what we thought was good architecture. I had the good fortune of having colleagues who always put design as the primary mover in any project. Lots of things grew out of the house projects. One client acquired a company in Salt Lake City and was interested in remodeling a house. Before we even got the house drawn, he had moved to another house, and we started working on that. Subsequently, his company leased the David Keith Mansion on South Temple, and in 1986 there was a disastrous fire that pretty well incinerated the interior of the building. The mansion has an open central atrium, and the fire was a catastrophe because the heat immediately blew out the glass; it was like a chimney. No one was hurt, thank God. The morning after the fire, I was standing in the still-smoking ruins, and my client said, “It can’t be saved, but we’re insured, so you might as well try and fix it.” That was a great vote of confidence. It turned out to be the inception of a whole new world of architecture for our firm. We never intended to be in historical restoration. But the building was insured by Lloyd’s of London for mega dollars, and so we commenced. We structured the garden like a series of outdoor rooms, and that struck people because you didn’t see much of that in Salt Lake.
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