When I started, I didn’t know what a section drawing was. I didn’t know what an elevation drawing was. Fortunately, the year I was taking all the prerequisites, a professor of architecture agreed to do a reading program with me, and I read a book every week that he told me to read, and then we’d spend two or three hours talking about it. All volunteer on his part. It was a great way to become familiar with architecture in a broader sense. I started school in January, as I got out of the Navy at the end of December, so I was off-sequence. I took basic design and a 15-hour course credit in the summer, three-quarters of school in one session. It was quite intense. Architecture school is a lot of work, long hours. In hindsight, I probably learned a lot more from my fellow students than I did from the faculty. There were some faculty people who were very helpful and some who were pretty much not helpful. We had a good class of talented people, and we worked together quite well, solving most of the problems given to us by the faculty. And we challenged the faculty. For example, we had a restaurant project assigned to us. We interviewed all these people who owned restaurants, cooked in, and worked in restaurants to see what they were like. We were actually reprimanded for doing that because we weren’t doing it by the rules. We insisted on having restaurant people on the jury, and they invited a couple of restaurant guys to sit in. It was a very interesting education in that it was not only technical and not only developed the skills you needed to work in architecture but also developed camaraderie and group relationships, which served us well in practice. You graduated when? In 1975. I graduated from the U with a master’s degree. At the time, there were limited jobs. I applied and was accepted to do the Historic American Building Survey through the National Park Service for a summer, which gave me four months to look for work. I was married, had a young toddler daughter, and needed a job. Not only was it a great experience, but it also bought me time. Then I went to work for John Clawson for a few months and then Carpenter Stringham for a few years, and then Brixen and Christopher for quite a while, and Edwards and Daniels. Talk about what you learned in each office. I had worked with John Clawson for a summer when I was in school. His was a small practice, and it was good because I got a lot of exposure to engineering consultants and clients that you might not get in larger firms when you are right out of school. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a growth pattern, and we didn’t develop a lot of work. One Friday, he said, “I don’t have anything for you guys to do,” and Monday morning, I went out and got a new job at Carpenter and Stringham. That was a good place to work for a while. I got my license while I was there. I passed all the exams. I had some good experiences technically there. But one weekend, I decided there wasn’t a future there. So, I called Jim Christopher and he hired me. I worked there for several years, and that was an excellent experience. They were very good architects, and I actually did some of my best work there. The preservation development strategies did when I was on the Heritage Foundation was superb stuff. But I didn’t sense a future there either. They were not developing a culture of growth with younger people, and I went to Edwards and Daniels and had a similar experience there. When Abe Gillis and Bob Brotherton started Gillies Brotherton in 1978, I asked Abe, “I want to come work for you,” and he said, “No, I like you as my friend. We were neighbors. Maybe someday.” In 1986, Abe called me and said, “We’re talking with David Brems about bringing him in and forming a firm with a broader practice. Now I would like you to join me as my partner.” Bingo. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. Mike and Abe had a very strong practice in industrial and some institutional work. David had a portfolio with private development, and I had some good planning experience. We thought that was a good, healthy merger of broader market areas and personality. We’re very different people, and it turned out to be a very positive group in spite of our idiosyncrasies. The first thing I did was manage the Consolidated Maintenance Facility project at Tooele Army Depot. I had only been with them a week or so before the interview. That was a significant project because of the environmental issues associated with it. It had zero discharge of pollutants, even though it was cleaning engine parts and doing a lot of nasty processes. We had a very sophisticated roof with skylights over the eight-acre shop floor. In the interior, there was daylight on the work floor with no glare. Pretty significant impact from an environmental perspective, long before anybody talked about LEED or anything else. From there, I moved into some planning work. We did the Judicial System Master Plan for the State of Utah and State of Utah Library Studies. I led the teams on both of those. We developed a lot of work based on the judicial master plan and subsequent court remodeling and established a relationship with the Office of the Courts. That expanded our ability to work for the State of Utah on a wide variety of projects, not only buildings but also planning and helping solve their problems. The library study, for example, was when all the colleges and institutions in Utah had the worst libraries in the state. All I had to do was ask them. They wanted a pile of money that was way out of reach of the legislature. The legislature said, “Wait a minute, you guys all can’t have the worst. Somebody has got to be worst.” We were hired to sort through that and were able to do it quite effectively. We had some good consultants and visited all the facilities. We could say, “Do you realize that such and such school does not even have a library? Wouldn’t they be in worse shape than you?” We were able to come to a unanimous decision of all the university and college presidents in a priority order of which libraries needed the first attention. 13
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