founders. That was both a wonderful experience and the seeds of disaster because there were 10 of us who hadn’t really worked that well together, pulling this buyout together. It all worked as long as the economy was good. But in 1990, there was another recession, and there was a lot of infighting between the Florida office, the Chicago office and the Iowa office on who ought to take the cuts. Ultimately, that led to firing two presidents. When they brought in a president from the outside, I met him, then said, “I have to leave. This is not going to work.” I then joined Cannon Design in Buffalo, New York, another large national firm. I was nominally in charge of the Buffalo office healthcare practice, though that didn’t really mean a whole lot because more of the healthcare practice was done in other offices throughout the country. I had met Tom Jensen of Jensen Haslam, and we developed a relationship while working on a hospital in Burley, Idaho. One snowy day in Buffalo, New York, he called and said, “I see that it’s snowing. Are you ready to come to Utah yet?” So, on Jan. 1, 1997, I started here in Salt Lake in charge of Jensen Haslam’s, 15-20 person Salt Lake office. The rest of the firm was in Logan. I had moved to Utah with one great motive: I had two 10-year-old sons, and they needed their dad. But I came with experience and a relationship This is an opportunity for two smaller firms to become one of the bigger firms in Salt Lake.” He went back and approached his colleagues, and thus the marriage came to be. Talk about projects that you were particularly proud of and why? The Huntsman Cancer Hospital is one not only because it’s beautiful, not only because it’s important here, but also because I lost a daughter to cancer while we were designing it. And every time I go up there, I’m close to my daughter. At the Huntsman Cancer Hospital, we had an opportunity to start from scratch and do healthcare the right way. Working with the University of Utah as well as Intermountain Healthcare, and we began slowly developing work. My first assignment, almost the day that I arrived, was to help the hospital in Heber, which was in just awful shape, find a way to replace itself. I found out later that the corporate man in finance wanted this study done so that he could close that hospital. I lived in Heber, and the study to do that hospital was quite an exercise. We needed only 12 beds, and the architectural issue was to design it so that 40 staff members could operate the whole hospital. Most of the staff had multiple jobs. The assistant administrator was also the OR director, and on and on. At the same time, we had a contract with the hospital in Nephi. That created a practice for us in small hospitals that was quite amazing. In the course of 10 years, we did 25 or 30 very small hospitals throughout the Western United States and the first brand-new hospital in Maine in 40 years. Along that path, we established ourselves doing healthcare work. The University of Utah was ready to begin a development of their hospital facilities, again, very badly needed additions and renovations. One of the local contractors came to me and said, “If you team with Thomas Petersen Hammond, you will win that job, and we’d like to be your partner.” I’d not met anyone from Thomas Petersen Hammond, and to my great joy, I met Tim Thomas, who became a dear friend, and we won the project. I’m very proud of that facility because we changed not only the look but also the quality of delivery of the facilities. So now how did Thomas Petersen, Hammond and Jensen Haslam get together? I was the person who knew both firms really quite well as we worked on the University [of Utah] Hospital project. I actually asked the people from Thomas Petersen Hammond to come take up space in our office so we could work as colleagues. They did, and we found that we liked them an awful lot. As that project came to the end of design, I went to Tim and said, “Would you guys ever think about joining up — being together? with me was a physician, Joe Simone, who was vital to the development of the Huntsman Cancer Institute and the Director of the hospital. And we laid out some principles: we said the patient comes first. And throughout the design process, we would ask that question, “What’s best for the patient?” And what you see when you go visit that facility is our take on what was best for the patient, even if that made the assignments for those who work there a little bit more difficult. That was fundamental to why I was doing healthcare architecture as a specialty. 10 REFLEXION
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