Pub. 2 2021-2022 Issue 1

18 REFLEXION | 2021-22 | AIA Utah INTERVIEW BY FRAN PRUYN AND ROBERT PINON, MHTN O ur first interview was with Elden Talbot . We met with him in May 2020 and talked about what attracted him to architecture and his practice, partners, struggles, successes, and guiding philosophies. Talbot was one of the second generation of architects that guided the architecture firm Ashton Evans and Brazier, founded in 1923, into a new iteration of the firm that they called Montmorency Hayes and Talbot (MHT, later MHTN). Elden Talbot is now 89, retired for thirty years, and living with his son-in-law. The interviewers met with him one morning in May in their home in Emigration Canyon. He was bright, happy to tell his story, apologized that he is a little hard of hearing but very quick with clear answers and quite a few opinions. The Utah Chapter of the American Institute of Architects has been meeting with some of the retired architectural legends in our community. We are archiving their personal memories of practicing architecture during the second half of the 20th Century, as well as capturing their personalities on film. Each architect we talked with had different career goals and trajectories, but there is a common theme of building practices before and during when technology took over. The design industry has evolved to become much more computer-driven, and the profession became much more sophisticated, corporate, and fiercely competitive. We have video recorded these interviews and will be releasing much-shortened video versions to our members through e-blasts. The complete interviews will be archived for posterity, and of course, for the architects’ friends and families for their personal use. Elden Talbot, AIA Interviews with Local Legends When did you decide to be an architect? In high school, I wanted to be a landscape architect, so I took Latin so I could know botanical names and so forth. But my dad was a building contractor, and I worked on summer jobs with him, and I finally decided that maybe I wanted to switch my thinking and become an architect. Where did you go to school? I lived in Idaho Falls at the time, but I went to the University of Utah. I started school at the U in 1950. Roger Baily was the Dean of the School of Architecture. At the time, there were no lady students of architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright was coming to Salt Lake to be interviewed for a project at Westminster College, so they invited him to speak to the students; so since he was coming, we put up the very finest work we could come up with in our little exhibition hall [the school was in a barracks building] for him to look at. He was speaking to us, and all of a sudden, he stopped, in the middle of his talk, and he went around, and looked at all the exhibits and came back and said, ‘gentlemen, you are wasting your time.’ That made the professors very happy. Salt Lake City Mayor Earl Glade took Frank Lloyd Wright on a trip around