Reflecting on 50 Years: A Founder’s Perspective by Bill O’Brien
Things were very different at the beginning. Let me give you some examples: Sweets, callbacks, Greyhound, plan room, adjustable triangle… These might mean nothing to people younger than the firm, so check with someone older than you if you don’t know what they are!
Before “THE” beginning, there was “A” beginning. Three individuals came together from different backgrounds and experiences but had a common problem. The architecture firm they had been working for had cut everybody back to four days a week, translating to a 20% cut in pay. So, they asked each other, “What are we going to do?”
The answer came from a meeting on a dark and stormy night in a dark hotel bar right outside downtown Durham. They quickly determined that they needed work and that they needed to do something about it. The decision was to open a new architectural firm.
So, at that point, it was just “A” plan. “THE” plan happened 50 years ago on April 25th, 1975. “THE” plan was that we secured a project: a residence for a UNC-Chapel Hill coach. Other projects quickly followed, allowing the three of us to enter the (small) room that was the firm’s first office. It was on East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill.
That one room didn’t last too long. We moved to a suite of offices in the adjacent building, still on Franklin Street, but even that got too tight too quickly. So, we moved to Eastowne on Chapel Hill Boulevard, across from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Building. After a few years, even that got too tight, so we decided to buy some land, build our own building, and stay in Chapel Hill. We signed a contract to buy a piece of property on the east side of the Blue Cross Blue Shield property.
No sooner had we done that than we thought maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do…. If I-40 was ever built between Chapel Hill and the Research Triangle, maybe the Research Triangle is where we ought to be… But how would we get out of this contract we have already signed? Well, a clause in the contract required it to be rezoned by the Chapel Hill town council. So, the plan was to do absolutely nothing! There would be no phone calls, no telling anybody what an economic benefit it would be… It did not get rezoned on a 5-4 vote, and we had our way out. In 1986, we moved to our present office in the Research Triangle in a building that was developed by Robb Teer. It’s still our office to this day.
You might wonder what spurred all this growth. The first thing we did was take that dark and smoky plan and turn it into a business plan. That started with hiring Rita Whitfield to lead the effort. She did a great job, and she’s still doing a great job for the firm today.
We wouldn’t be here without our dedicated staff. In the early days, we quickly added mechanical and electrical engineering, landscape architecture and planning, and interior design and space planning. We found a young construction guy and brought him in to head our contract administration and field work. He’s retired but was able to celebrate this milestone with us.
By the time we hired those disciplines, we realized we were drowning in a sea of paper. We had paper drawings, paper files, paper coming out of our ears, and we had no system for organizing it. We conducted a national search and found a young lady from Ohio with a Library Science background who came down and got our paper organized.
Some disciplines we never brought in-house are civil and structural engineering. One of our structural engineering partners has probably worked on many of our buildings. He’s also retired but was able to celebrate with us.
Let me talk a little bit about our projects. Some of them were the first of their kind.
For example, we did the first MRI for Duke Hospital. Once they quickly realized the value of that machine, we did two more. An interesting challenge during that project was that we couldn’t use any steel; it had to be concrete and wood. A wood addition to a major hospital was slightly out of character, but we navigated the challenge successfully.
We did the first building on NC State’s Centennial Campus.
We also did the first indoor habitat at the North Carolina Zoo.
And we did a “last”. The State Employees’ Credit Union of North Carolina had a goal of putting an office in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties. We helped them meet that goal. It could have been the Hayesville office out in the western part of the state or the Barco office down east, but one of those was number 100…. We were doing a lot of credit unions at the same time!
Thinking back on some statistics that represent our work over the years, a few metrics stand out. We have received 100 design awards over the past 50 years. Earlier this year, Durham School of the Arts, which is a part of the Durham Public School System and is now under construction, earned our 100th design award.
Other metrics show our impact. Looking at the Research Triangle Park, for example, we’ve designed over 6.5 million square feet across almost 150 projects. Some of those projects are: four buildings for IBM, which the Teer Associates developed, multiple projects for Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Cisco’s campus, multiple projects for RTI, the GlaxoSmithKline campus, MCNC, and the EPA Computer Center which was our first LEED® project, and at the time, it was one of only six in the federal portfolio of LEED® projects. Others include NetApp, SCM Metal Products, Biogen, Eli Lilly, Eisai… so maybe that decision to move from Chapel Hill to RTP wasn’t so crazy after all!
I’m going to give you a quick read of some of our other projects to highlight the variety of scale and project type that we do.
Central Medical Park in Durham was one of our first large projects. We also did many projects for Wachovia Bank, and many projects for RDU.
For Caterpillar, we’ve done four major projects: two in North Carolina for manufacturing, one in South Carolina. One of those was a completely integrated design center where new products are designed, built, and rigorously tested to ensure function and durability. We’ve done two projects for Honda… Both are in Alamance County. One builds lawnmowers and the other builds jet aircraft engines.
Raleigh Convention Center is another major project. We renovated the old Convention Center and did the current Convention Center, including the adjacent Red Hat Amphitheater.
We’ve worked on community college campuses across the state, including Durham Tech, Wake Tech, and Wilson Community College… For the UNC system, we’ve worked on 10 campuses. Additionally, we designed a dorm for Duke University and are now renovating one of their original classroom buildings.
Shifting to courthouses, we designed court facilities for Durham, Wake, and Forsyth Counties. City of Durham, we did their Police Headquarters. Wake County, we’re in the final months of construction of their new Public Health Facility. North Carolina National Guard, we did their Raleigh Headquarters, and we did their Training Center, which was a multi-building project in Fort Bragg.
We did a vitamin manufacturing plant for Pharmavite to produce their Nature Made product line in Opelika, Alabama.
We did two floors of interior upfit for Duke’s Office of Development, which is one of our interior design projects. The North Carolina Arboretum outside Asheville is one of our landscape projects. We also do site development studies for Duke Energy and other entities. These are throughout North Carolina and show the potential for somebody to occupy the site.
We did the Duke Health Davis Ambulatory Surgical Center. We did the Nature Research Center which is part of the “Green Square” in downtown Raleigh. We also did the Wolfspeed project that is just finishing up in Chatham County
The variety of these projects and their locations make the design profession exciting. Sometimes, even retired people don’t know how to get away from it all!
The changes we went through to do all this started when we lost Belton Atkinson, the third founder of the firm, alongside John Atkins and me. He was a real leader in the drafting room with the young folks starting up, and an equal leader on the job site. Those who miss him know what he did for the firm and enjoyed having him to work with.
Other things went away very quickly—for old-timers, it was almost too quick. Suddenly, there was no paper anymore. Our paper organizer became our marketing organizer. She handled preparations for presentations and proposals. She’s now retired, but she agreed to come back and help us with our fabulous 50th Anniversary event.
The drawings that we used to put on paper are now on a computer screen. We are not using those adjustable triangles anymore. We don’t have to ship big rolls of drawings. We tried shipping by snail, we tried it by Greyhound, we tried it by overnight air, and now we can do it with just pressing a button. It can go anywhere in the world, even India, Saudi Arabia, and maybe even Peru- who knows! It’s been almost a total change in the way we practice. It’s gone digital. Perhaps it’s good, or maybe there’s still a learning curve. When I say all the paper is gone, it seems that there is one workstation with a lot of paper around… a bunch of red pens too, I bet, and that is my own desk.
Other things went away. But one thing that didn’t change… we still go to job sites and must leave the office to do that. But we no longer have to leave to attend meetings; they are all done on the computer. So, there is no need for callbacks. When we would come back from the jobsite, the receptionist would hand us a stack of callbacks. If they want you now, they don’t use a landline; they use email or a cellphone to reach you virtually anywhere at any time.
We no longer need those AGC plan rooms where bidders had to look at a set of drawings that we sent to do their takeoff. That can all be done on the computer.
To illustrate how things have changed… Sweets Catalog used to be a multi-volume set of books. It had every construction material and system known to man. Today, you can get all that information on a cellphone in seconds.
These past 50 years haven’t been stagnant—virtually everything has changed. But the story continues. Thanks to all of you who have made this story possible. We couldn’t have done it without you.