20 REFLEXION | 2021-22 | AIA Utah Interviews with Local Legends Tony Wegener, AIA Tony Wegener is an Australian native. When he came to Logan, Utah, in the 1960s to marry his fiancé, the plan was to stay here for five years, get to know her people, and then return home to Australia. He joined a seventy-year-old firm, Schaub Haycock & Associates, in 1966. When the owner retired, Tony and his partners reorganized the firm and renamed it Architectural Design West. The firm is still thriving, and so is Tony. After fifty years in the industry, he is retired and still lives in Logan, but visits Hawaii three weeks out of every year to surf – an addiction he acquired early in Australia. BY FRAN PRUYN How did you decide to become an architect? My mother was working in a medical clinic in Perth, Western Australia. I wanted to be a doctor because of being around them. My art teacher took me to one side and said, “You have talent, kid. You need to be an architect.” The doctors I lived with said, “Look, apply yourself to where your talent is.” I went to school at Perth Technical College. It was a five-year course: three years full-time and two years part-time. I worked four days a week, and went to school one day a week and two nights a week. So, I had the practical experience at the same time we were doing the professional experience. My design teacher was a woman, the first licensed architect in Western Australia. She was licensed in the 1920s, and she was fabulous. The first three years, we feared her, and the last two years, we loved her. We feared her because she dumped one design assignment on top of another design assignment, and we had no idea what we were doing until we learned by doing it. Sort of like riding a bicycle; you can't tell someone how to ride a bicycle. You can coach them if they trust you. And we trusted her. The state paid for my education. I got a scholarship, but I had to work for the state for four years after I graduated. Turns out I only worked one year for the state. I joined the LDS Church [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints] when I was 20, and I got called on a mission as an architect for the church, so I worked in Sydney for almost two years with the worldwide program building one-and-a-half chapels a day. We did about 15 meeting houses, and I got to travel all over Australia to construction sites. How did you move from Perth to Logan, Utah? The short story is I met a girl from Logan, Utah, in Sydney and followed her home. I was engaged to my wife before she left Australia. She worked in the hospital as a dietitian, then she left and went around the world with her mother. In 1965, when my fiancée got back to the States, I got a tourist visa, and we got married six weeks later. I thought I owed it to my wife to spend a little time in her community, so I applied for a job at Schaub and Haycock. It was a family business that had been in business since 1892. We think it's the longest continuously operating architectural firm west of the Mississippi.
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