LEGENDS Ken Naylor, FAIA INTERVIEWED BY FRAN PRUYN, CPSM Ken Naylor took the helm of Silver Naylor Architects after Roy Silver retired in the mid‑80s. The firm, which was founded as Roy Richards Silver Architects in 1952, was a small but established practice. As its president, Ken helped grow the firm to the powerhouse that is now recognized for its projects in the federal, educational, and religious sectors. Ken talked to Fran Pruyn about his career, its evolution and his thoughts about architectural education. When did you decide to become an architect? Not until the year before I started graduate school. As a teenager, I thought about architecture as a possibility, but I met an architect who was very discouraged about the financial rewards of architecture and how disappointed he was in his early career as an architect. So, he changed careers, and I let that influence me. When I was an undergraduate at the university, I was reasonably good at math. I enjoyed geology immensely. And so, with the combination of geology and quite a bit of math, I was offered a scholarship by the Geophysics Department, and I held that scholarship for a number of years. It paid for a good portion of my undergraduate education. But I found the prospects for what I would be doing after I graduated in geophysics not tremendously appealing. From the time I was young, I loved the creative process. At relatively the last minute, I went back to architecture and thought that sounded a lot more appealing than being in a lab somewhere in Louisiana or on an offshore drilling rig or in the field in Wyoming. I changed in my last year to urban geography and applied to graduate school, and immediately went into Tom Kass’s basic design class the summer before I started my program. Graduate school was very demanding. I had married, and our economic condition was such that I had to work all the time. When I finished graduate school in architecture, my nickname was The Ghost because I was never there. I was either working or I was working at home, trying to spend time with my wife. What happened next? I worked for Gordon Gigi, a wonderful mentor, for three years in school. After I graduated, I expected that I would work with Gordon. His practice was quite limited; it was just the two of us and the secretary. I got to do pretty much everything. Out of the blue, one day, I got a call from Woodbury Corporation: “We’re looking for an architect to be our full-time staff architect. Would you interview?” I did. Then, I got a call from Roy Silver. Woodbury had given me his name as a reference because he’d worked for them. I returned Roy’s call, and he convinced me I didn’t want to be in the development world, but I needed to come to work for him. About a year out of school, I started working for Roy Silver and Dale Allsop. It was a little bit larger firm; there were maybe eight of us, including the two partners. I was taking licensing exams and became licensed. It worked very well. Roy had a philosophy of business that I embraced: pay people what they need to survive, then at the end of the year, give them a bonus that’s beyond their expectations. That became a tenet of my practice throughout my career. In the early 80s, Roy bought out Dale Allsop, so it was just Roy and I operating the firm. In ‘85 or ‘86, Roy retired, and I just continued on. Most of my practice was public education. I was working for Ross Wentworth at Granite School District. I watched Ross as he operated his school district responsibilities. I was impressed both with his abilities to administer and his handle on design. In the early 90s, I 14 REFLEXION
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