people graduating in my class, or it could have been the quality of the students. When I was going to school, I had the opportunity to work for Sir Frederick Gibberd, a storied architect in England. He was knighted by the Queen. My wife and I were newly married and spent a summer in London. I worked on a nuclear power plant in his office. The engineering attributes of that project were certainly not in my purview, but I did have input on the architectural expression of what was occurring in the guts of it. From that project, I learned how important it is to rely on the expertise of structural, mechanical, electrical and civil engineers. You have to hire the best to ensure you’ll become ultimately successful and avoid problems with those disciplines. Having really good people to work with was a joy: creating something that fulfilled the agenda of a client. In my practice, I also specialized in research projects, medical research and physical science research. I specialized in laboratories. You graduated and what happened next? I graduated in 1968 and went to work for an excellent architectural firm, Edwards and Daniels. I had a nice relationship with those individuals as mentors. Then I went to work for Richard Prowse, the developer of Prowsewood, to design their projects and augment their in-house capacity for plans and specs of specific unit types as they spun off their product to other locations. Then, that became a little tedious. In 1973, after spending enough time to qualify and pass the Architectural Record Exams, Stephen Peterson, who I graduated with, another graduating student, Jack Hammond, and I decided to hang our own shingle. Had you always wanted to go out on your own? Yes. I enjoyed the experience of working for others and learning things that I wanted to do and things I didn’t want to do. But I thought it was the best way to manage the outcomes because having someone looking over your shoulder was, in some instances, less than optimal. So, we practiced as Thomas Peterson Hammond for a number of years. How did you get your clients? I worked at the University of Utah with individuals in Campus Planning and Design on smaller projects. The individuals that I worked for had smaller projects and had both feet on the floor. They knew what they wanted and what they needed. I listened carefully and programmed what we were going to accomplish and had them sign off. I think I gained a reputation of being a responsive architect. My first large standalone project was the University of Utah’s Biomedical Polymer Research Building. It was the first project on the campus that had facilities designed for three separate colleges: Medicine, Pharmacy and Engineering. It is the architect’s responsibility to equip the building to not only fulfill the needs and desires of the current occupants from those three colleges, but the future, because change is the name of the game. That was one of the successful attributes of that first project. How did the three partners distribute the responsibilities? A majority of my practice was pretty specialized, and so I think my interface with Steve and Jack was somewhat limited because their portfolios didn’t really align themselves with research projects. We ended up needing a business manager who managed the practice’s funding and cash flow. Steve handled mostly the hiring and firing. I remember Jack tried to fire somebody and at the end of their conversation, the employee really didn’t understand that he was fired. Clear communication was a cornerstone of my agenda with my clients because without it, you create a situation with unfulfilled expectations. We have expectations. Your client has expectations. Without resolution, you’re going to wish you had communication habits that were clear. Talk about your merger with Jensen Haslem. We were in competition with Jensen Haslem, and there was kind of a combination of circumstances that brought us to joining our firms. I realized that in Jensen Haslem, there were individuals whose expertise I admired. There was a general contractor who, in talking with the gorillas in the room at the university, suggested if we teamed Jensen Haslem, we’d have a really good shot at a new project at the university hospital. We decided to partner, and we executed the Critical Care Pavilion at the university hospital. After that we went after a hospital project in Durango, Colorado, and we were successful in getting it. As I understand, that hospital in Durango remains one of the more profitable hospitals. We worked hard at an efficient layout so that any one department could expand without affecting other departments, which is a historic problem in hospitals. We have more patients needing this service, and the department is kind of landlocked. How do you deal with that? There’s a domino effect. You have to move some people out to make room 13
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