Pub. 2 2021-2022 Issue 1

23 competing for Symphony Hall, and Bob got it. We were friends, so I wrote a letter to Bob and said, “I really feel crummy. I really wanted to have that job, but if I can’t have it, I want you to have it.” A couple weeks later, Bob asked me to come over and said, “I want you to be my design consultant,” because it had to be done in a short period of time. Bob believed in me like I believed in him. We worked side by side. He was the architect; I was his design consultant. FFKR’s first project was Abravanel Symphony Hall for Salt Lake County. So, we started on Symphony Hall. There was enormous pressure, but sometimes pressure helps you with the decision- making process, and your brain works better because you can’t sit around and dream about things. You have got to get things done. Without Bob, it would never have happened. It wouldn’t have been the same without me, but I had no political weight. Bob had plenty of political weight (to sell the design). All this time, we were just having a great time. It was wonderful. The building never looked better than on opening night. Nobody had tampered with it. How did you divide the labor? How did you choose which projects you would work on? We were a studio. As a studio, we had a certain amount of freedom. FFKR today is a corporation. I could not survive there. A studio allows ideas to bubble up from below. Doesn’t matter who they come from; it is the best idea. When a new project would come in the office, we would assign it to one of us, and we just worked together and had very good people. We were careful that we worked hard every day and efficiently, and we were able to make our payroll. You couldn’t draw a corporate structure of either Enteleki or FFKR. It was a very artistic environment, I think, and I liked it a lot. We had a partner in charge — myself, Ray, Joe Rubin, and then we would have good people on the staff that worked with us. So, I would have my studio, my group of people, and Ray (Kingston) would have his studio and his group of people. What are you most proud of during your career? We were able to lift master planning out of a morass because of Jack Smith. Jack came from the East; he had a sophistication that I didn’t have. He undertook the master planning of Snowbird. I think we put master planning on a different plane, and the credit for that really goes to Jack. All we did was try to put modern architecture in a good light. We were all trained as modernists. I don’t think an architect can be everything to everybody. I think you have to focus on what you believe in and what you want to do. I know a lot about the Bauhaus, I know a lot about the Bauhaus principles, and I put them to work in my buildings. I have had some wonderful opportunities to put those ideas into play. The most meaningful projects: Abravanel Hall was a great experience for me. I did some stuff at BYU. The library there is buried. We said, “keep the quadrangle. Put the library below it.” I am quite proud of that building. We did the Delta Center, it was a pretty clean glass box. We had a very clean, beautiful building. Larry (Miller) was a demanding, fair, brilliant guy. You know, you learn as you work for various people that there’s some people that you can tell once and they get it. And there are other people that never get it. He got it. And the Jerusalem Center, and that was really wonderful. It took ten years to get that done. I was on the phone in the middle of the night talking to my Jewish partner in Jerusalem. Without him, it wouldn’t have gotten done. If you take the Jerusalem Center, the first day I walked out on the site, I was so happy I couldn’t talk. By the way, I have never done a project where the first sketches lead to the final result. If I showed you the first sketches for the Jerusalem Center, you would be shocked. I am shocked every time I look at them because they were so wrong. But you gotta start somewhere. Wrong in terms of what the client wanted, or wrong in terms of what the building was about? The latter. Jewish subcontractors hired Palestinian craftsmen to build that building. I had no appreciation for that when I started on it. We finally developed a good scheme; the first scheme was terrible. I don’t think you can start with details and end up with a good building. You have to start out with a unifying concept and let the details come later. How do you feel about the evolution of the (architectural) industry, from the sixties when you began until 2006 when you retired? Everything I am telling you came before computers. I had a pencil and a hand, and every project on there was done with a pencil and a hand, and no Computer Assisted Design, which I recognize is a great thing, but I pre-dated that, and I honestly don’t know how I would have done. Modern Architecture today can be horrible or it can be great, and it is both. If you look at Renzo Piano and his work, it’s great. If you look at some of this other stuff that you can see everywhere, it’s junk. And I don’t feel good about it, and I think it is because people don’t draw anymore. Now that is a very naïve opinion, but drawing helps you think, and if you are sitting in front of a screen and you are poking buttons and the button does everything for you, I think your brain tends to shrink a little. On the other hand, there are some really great buildings being built right now by people who depend on computers to do their work. I don’t know how they do it; I couldn’t. I was far too biased toward working with this guy (his hand).  — continued on page 24