Pub. 2 2021-2022 Issue 4

22 REFLEXION | 2021-22 | AIA Utah developer. I’d call his secretary and she’d say, “Give me a few weeks and I'll call you back.” Finally, she said, “He will see you, but go to the University of Utah Medical Center to see him,” because he had an accident on a trampoline and broke his neck. I went to see him not knowing really what I was going to say. I didn't know that he was paralyzed until they wheeled him up in a wheelchair. And he looked at me and said, “Mr. Wegener, you can begin.” So, I just talked to him about what I wanted to talk to him about, and he said, “Thank you very much.” And I left. I've never seen him again. And yet he’s my hero because I realized, here’s a guy who’s still working. Work is important. From that point on, I got my mojo back and decided to give it my very best. What happened? We made it. It was hard. We let half our people go. We had formed several affiliated companies, including the design-build firm, and they were dissolved. We focused on architecture. We continued to do schools in California and the west, and we did lots of hospital work for Intermountain Healthcare. Then I got into student housing and positioned us to do the 2002 Winter Olympic Village, which then was the biggest project ever awarded by the State. After that, we got into military housing. We did half a billion dollars of military housing with a local contractor with whom we won designbuild contracts for the Air Force. One day we were invited to Colorado Mesa University. We made a presentation and were selected. We worked for them for 11 years, until my retirement. We did a lot of student housing and classroom buildings for university work. It was wonderful. Tell us about your design philosophies, and changes you have seen in architecture since you began in the sixties. One of my clients’ employees gave him an article about design thinking. The article was about Stanford’s design school, which had started in 1969, the same year HKS came out with their “Problem Seeking Problem Solving Techniques and Design by Team” which we adopted. 1969 was a formative year in architecture for me. My client said, “Tell me about this design thinking.” And I said, “Okay,” but first I flew to Stanford and spent the day in the Design Thinking Lab, which was fascinating. There was not a single computer there. It was all about learning to collaborate and cooperate and communicate, verbally and graphically. I was blown away. I mean, that's how I learned architecture. I learned by doing and communicating. When I started in 1958, I did all my drafting in ink on linen, using ruling pens. The founder of our firm began in 1892, and nothing had changed in the way he practiced or prepared drawings, construction documents in 1958, when he died. Since then, everything has changed. Rapidographs replaced ruling pens and then overlay drafting became the forerunner of computer drafting and design. Then the computers came online. I tried to learn CADD, but I was the marketing manager, not in production. And so I got left behind. When I would pull out a drafting board and start doing some things, people would come and watch me. I've kind of regretted that I didn't take the time, but there were plenty of others who had that capability. What do you think is a good building? We’ve done a lot of good designs that our clients are very happy with. But that was never our objective, our objective was to have a firm that served our needs first, made us feel good, but also made our clients feel good. Richard Clyde did a wonderful elementary school in St George. It was a marvelous school. His clients loved it. They did a middle school, and they didn’t even invite him to propose for it. He came to me almost in tears saying, “Why do we do this? I’ve just busted buns for a school that’s got all kinds of awards, national energy awards, and they didn't even invite me.” It was an epiphany. I said, “Richard, you do your best for your own self-respect. You do your best for your client. If you do your best for your own self-respect, your client will be wellserved. But don’t do your best hoping to get rewards from a corporate client or a school board because they’re fickle. So do your best for yourself.” That’s our firm approach. We created a company people want to join and, if we do our best, then our clients will be well-served. Do you have any advice for people starting in the business today. I have loved being an architect, just loved getting up in the morning to go to work, even when I was 75. I loved getting up to work on a proposal for a project that we didn’t win. This is such a wonderful profession. It's so broad – there are so many pieces to it that anyone can find a niche in which they can be successful and happy. Not every architect has to be a wonderful designer. There’s room for everybody. I tell people I loved it all: from marketing to design to construction documents to working in the field. It's been a privilege and a pleasure to work in Utah. Because at least I never ran into graft and corruption ever. No one ever offered me a bribe; I never accepted one. Someone told me, “You were just too dumb to notice,” but I think it's been refreshing.  — continued from page 21 To watch the full interview, please scan this QR code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc3yq63Chy8

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