When did you decide to become an architect? I decided to be an architect at a pretty young age. I helped my father build a house when I was 10. Then at 13 or 14, I took a drafting class, and the last project was to design a house, and I was hooked. Where were you? I grew up in Midland, Michigan. It was the home of Dow Chemical, one of the largest chemical companies in the world. It was a great place to grow up because of the intellectual quality of that town. One of the sons of the founder was Aldon Dow, who was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Where were you trained and then ultimately how did you land here? In high school, I decided to try to go to the University of Michigan. I also applied to BYU. The University of Michigan, to my great astonishment, sent me a letter saying that they “couldn’t predict my success.” So, after graduating from BYU, I still planned to be an architect, but BYU did not have an architecture school. So I reapplied to the University of Michigan and graduated as one of the top in my class in 1976. Having graduated, I moved to Washington, D.C. This was during a recession that was every bit as deep as the recession of 2009-2010. I sent resumes to every architect in the phone book and got six replies. When I visited them, three of them said, “We just liked your resume. We didn’t have anything else to do; we just thought we would talk to you since you are here.” I got no job offers. But during my time at the University of Michigan, I was a draftsman at a hospital consulting firm, and I got great experience learning about hospitals and healthcare. I used that experience to find a job with a startup hospital consulting firm in D.C. that turned into a great opportunity. Six months later, we had won a project for the federal government in Hawaii with two architectural firms that had no healthcare experience at all. Since I was single, they asked me to move to Hawaii (hard duty, but somebody had to do it) to be the resident. This was in early 1977. I distinctly remember sending sketches back to the home office using a fax machine, five minutes per page. I was there for six weeks at a time, off and on for three years. The rest of the time, I was back in the States, working on other projects. Soon, we had a project working for the San Diego Naval replacement hospital and a replacement hospital for the VA in Bay Pines. These were projects that were driven by the federal government to try to pull the United States out of a recession. So here I was traveling back and forth between Hawaii, Long Beach in California and Florida for three years, with a few stops in D.C. to see what was going on in the office. It was an amazing experience for someone who was just out of school. What did you learn? It started before that, in the summer of 1974, while I was still in school working for a hospital consulting firm. Our assignment was to develop signage for a hospital in East Detroit. They took me to this hospital, and I sat in the emergency room right across from registration. You couldn’t do this today because of HIPAA laws. I was within two or three feet of where they would check in patients. In comes a construction worker who had dropped steel on his toe. They had no place for him to sit at the registration desk. It was a metal, old line desk with a standard that had glass in it. They asked him, “What’s your name? What’s your mother’s name? What’s your father’s name?” The 40 questions that you get. He was obviously not feeling well, so he turned around to sit beside me and she said, “Oh, I only have three more questions.” He turned around, fainted and hit the top of the pole that held the edge of the glass and fell on the floor right in front of me. They picked him up, put him on the gurney and took him into the emergency room. A half-hour later, I saw him admitted to the hospital with a concussion. What I learned from that was: we can do better. During that time, I got the experience of starting to design these big hospitals; hospitals that would now be billion-dollar hospital projects, three of them in the very conceptual stages. No architect with one year or two years of experience ever got to do that. How did your career evolve? When those projects started to decrease, our consulting activities focused less on designing hospitals and more on the operations of hospitals. While it was fascinating, it didn’t feed my desire to be an architect. At the five-year mark, in 1979/80, I got restless. I had met another architect in Washington, D.C. and asked him if they had a position. This guy knew my boss. He called him and said, “Is this okay?” That was one of the first times I saw someone sacrifice themselves for the development of another person. I moved to a firm that I don’t think exists anymore, VBKR. It was a 200-person firm that serviced Virginia. The University of Virginia was doing a major replacement hospital in Charlottesville. We teamed with what we thought was the best national firm: Hansen Lind Meyer, another firm that no longer exists. That introduced me to Dick Hansen. I moved to Iowa to be an understudy to him and learned an immense amount about how to work with academic medical centers. That led to work at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, the University of Iowa and so on. It was quite a resume builder. Within a couple of years, he decided it was time to retire, and I was part of a group that was tasked with buying out the two 9
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