As his Alexander Road-based international architecture
firm celebrates its 40th anniversary, J. Robert Hillier,
in great demand as a speaker, is being asked just what
made him so successful, and how others can emulate his
success. Although he does not say it in so many words, his
life experience shows that to be successful in business
you need to go with your gut. Yes, he loved to draw and
solve problems as a kid, perhaps influenced by his father,
James Hillier, still alive at age 91, who is known as the
inventor of the electron microscope. And yes, his mother,
Florence, now deceased, had a paper from sixth grade where
he said he wanted to be an architect. But in the end, he
says, choosing architecture was a wholly pragmatic
decision.
He had decided initially to become a labor lawyer,
inspired by a summer job in a forge, on the night shift,
making automobile springs for the Mather Spring Company.
“I was fascinated by the whole idea of labor and unions,”
he says.
Things took a different turn after he got to Princeton
University. An honor student, he also became an officer of
his class and when the guy who was designing the
decorations for the freshman prom flunked out, Hillier did
the responsible thing and volunteered to take over the
design for the dance. That’s how he got involved in
building dance decorations.
When his grades went down to Bs and Cs, he went to his
advisor for help, and recalls saying, “There has to be a
way of getting better grades at Princeton and having as
much fun as I have had building these things.” His advisor
suggested he have a talk with the architecture school. He
did just that, changed his major to architecture, and upon
graduation got a full scholarship for a master’s degree.
And after 40 plus years in his chosen profession, he says,
“It’s been a joy.”
Hillier is being feted throughout the region this fall,
and recently addressed students at the New Jersey
Institute of Technology on ways to build a successful
practice. He is being honored by Princeton University at a
private reception at his firm on Monday, October 16, at
which university president Shirley Tilghman will be on
hand to offer congratulations. He gives a free public
lecture at Philadelphia University on Wednesday, November
15, at 6 p.m. (Call Scott Ogburn at 215-951-2933 for more
information.)
Although Hillier’s tips developed out of talks to students
on how to become a successful architect, he sees them as
relevant to just about any business. He offers several
examples:
Never say no the first time. “Often architects will get a
crazy phone call and will dismiss it, saying, `We don’t do
that kind of work or project’ without listening to it,”
says Hillier. He shares an example from his own business:
“We were doing a multibillion-dollar campus from scratch
in Rhode Island, a charter plane was waiting for me, and I
was dashing out, when I got a phone call from a farmer in
Cranbury, who asked, `Mr. Hillier, do you do fruit
stands?’” Instead of giving him the brush off with a quick
“We don’t do fruit stands. Why don’t you call another
architect,” Hillier asked him to explain what he had in
mind.
The farmer had been selling apples from the back of his
station wagon on the road and making decent money. “I
thought I could make it more official and build a fruit
stand,” said the farmer. The two men met and eventually
built a 2,000 to 3,000-square-foot farmers market. “It
became so popular,” says Hillier, “that people asked, `Who
did this thing?’ and we got a lot of business out of it.”
Bottom line: If you say no too quickly, you will miss
opportunities.
Get a summer job where you are doing lots of personal
transactions. Hillier used to work in a flower shop,
Princeton’s Flower Basket, which his mother owned, and
where he says he learned both how to read people and how
to respond to them. “If you are working in a flower shop
or a clothing store,” he says, “you are dealing with a
combination of function and emotion, and doing it every 10
minutes with every customer.”
“You have the customer’s need and you have the ability to
solve it,” says Hillier, “and you start to be able to read
a client.” In that sense it’s the same set of skills
needed by an architect, learning how to read people and
address their needs. Because young architects spend lots
of time in the back room and don’t even get to see the
client for a couple of years, this early experience is
invaluable. If you can’t read a customer and respond
appropriately, he concludes, you can’t give him the right
architecture.
Understand bureaucracies. “If you fight it, you don’t get
anywhere,” says Hillier. “If you figure out its purpose
and play to its purpose, you can use it to your
advantage.” He recalls an instance in England, a country
with a well-developed, tightly structured bureaucracy. He
was in London, walking along a sidewalk where every three
feet there was a brass plaque stating that below the
sidewalk was a fire-protected parking garage. He couldn’t
fathom what kind of rule would require those plaques.
“That was when I thought that bureaucracy has gone too
far,” he says, “but there was probably a good reason and
if I understood the reason, I wouldn’t fight it.”
He recalled this observation later when he had a fire exit
problem in Rhode Island, where he was able to convince a
fire marshal that a different type of fire exit would
satisfy the rule book – by pointing out that the rule
could be interpreted a different way.
Another way to work with bureaucracy, he says, is to get
out in front of it. “When we design a building,” he says,
“we will talk to officials before starting so they can
tell us where their concerns are, and we can then design
the building to their concerns. We’d rather know what we
can and can’t do at the beginning of the game, and our
clients get better served when we do that.”
Understand the impact of advancing technology. “We all owe
it to ourselves to keep up with advancing technology as
much as we may not want to,” says Hillier. He cites a
“huge network of brilliant invention” that has changed the
way architects work.
Buildings themselves are much more complex. Design work is
done by computer-aided design (CAD) machines instead of by
hand, and work can be shared easily over the Internet.
Technology has its good and bad sides, says Hillier. On
the one hand there is increased efficiency and speed – and
lower costs. “We can design a building today, send the
design to China to get the rendering, and get it back the
next morning.” It now takes a third of the time that it
once did to design and produce a building. “All this is
possible only because of digitizing and the ability to
send stuff by computer,” he says.
But there’s a downside too. The CAD machine gets in the
way of the emotional attachment that architects used to
have to their pencil drawings. With CAD, architecture has
become less of a craft, says Hillier, “and buildings are
less personal and have less soul. The buildings that do
have craft are still works of art, but are very
expensive.”
Another consequence of technology is that houses all over
the country produced by the same architect are often
identical, whereas 20 years ago a house in Pennsylvania
and one in California would be different. “The typical
American house is produced by a virtual factory of
standard parts put together,” he says. “Because of
efficiency there is a lot of homogenization and
commoditization.”
Learn a team sport. “Lots of people think of architecture
as somebody’s brilliance,” says Hillier, “but today
buildings are so complex that they are created by teams of
people, each with different specialties.” He likens it to
the difference between being a tennis player or a golfer
and being a member of a basketball or soccer team. Tennis
players and golfers are only interested in their single
shots or strokes, but on team players must understand
where they need to be, where other players are, who’s got
the ball, who should get the ball.
When working on a complex project like a hospital or big
laboratory, where 25 to 40 specialists may be part of the
development team, it is essential to understand how a team
works. “Knowing how to manage your ego and support your
team,” says Hillier, “are skills learned on a soccer or
basketball team but not on a tennis court.”
Hillier’s combination of basic business and people sense
and architectural design skill is reflected in his firm’s
growth from a sole practitioner in 1966 to a 350-person
firm providing a range of services, with offices in
Princeton, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.,
Shanghai, and Dubai. He has designed corporate campuses,
including the GlaxoSmithKline World Headquarters in
London; unique condominiums in a former Princeton garage;
and campus projects for several of the Ivies.
His current projects include the East River Science Park,
an 870,000-foot biotech center in Manhattan and restoring
and renovating the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also one of
three finalists for the job of planning the redevelopment
of the Princeton Junction train station in West Windsor.
It looks easy when done by a master, but following
Hillier’s tips for success can help anyone to reach a
little higher – and with joy.
