Corrections or additions?
This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the October 29, 2003
issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane: Hillier Architects
Five architects who made their careers at Hillier have
opened their own practice on Mapleton Road, in the building that used
to house another architectural practice. The company, called Ikon.5
Architects, consists of Alan Chimacoff, Joseph Tattoni, Arvind Tikku,
Charles Maira, and Richard Holmes, all former leaders of Hillier’s
higher education studio.
Chimacoff, a principal at Hillier, was released by the firm last
November
after 16 years as being director of design. The other four, all
associate
principals, left Hillier on September 2, and Holmes describes the
parting as pleasant and professional. “On the way out, shaking
our hands, Bob Hillier told us, `If it doesn’t work out, you guys
always have a home here.’ Certainly the experience, the guidance,
and the mentoring we got there is why we are where we are now.”
“It was a moment when we were looking for new horizons,” says
Holmes. “Everyone has different thresholds for where they are
and where they want to be, and this seemed the moment to do it.”
Unlike other areas, college and university building programs are
healthy.
“It seemed time to take a swing at being our own bosses, charting
our own course, making the choices about the kinds of work we do,
the projects we pursue, and how the resources get allocated in our
firm.”
The five talents mesh well. Chimacoff is the name-brand designer
responsible
for the Princeton Materials and Science Institute on Prospect Street,
and with Tattoni he did the new law school at Rutgers Newark. Tattoni
does a little of everything — design, run teams, win jobs, and
work with clients. Maira focuses on the technical aspects and quality
control and did major work on the new building for the Princeton
Public
Library. “He is a master at interpreting design so that the
contractors
can understand what it is,” says Holmes. Tikku is the operations
person making sure projects are appropriately staffed and moving
forward.
Holmes is an interior designer who concentrates on marketing. All
are married, and between them they have 10 children, of which five
are Maira’s.
Their portfolio includes commissions at 10 universities, including
Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers. Chimacoff invokes the term
“strong architectural concepts” to describe the team’s work,
saying that each project is rooted meaningfully to its place, informed
by the ideas, values, history, and traditions of the client. “You
might say we create modern buildings based on ancient principles,”
says Chimacoff.
The Hillier studio they left behind has two dozen people working in
Princeton in the area of higher education, about 40 people overall
in the various locations (New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and
Dallas) “Other people have experience and will jump into the
breach,”
says Holmes. “Both Hillier and our group can take credit for the
buildings that were done while we were at Hillier,” says Holmes.
“Bob Hillier has been very kind to say we can use the images on
our website as long as we put up the disclaimer that these projects
were done while we were at Hillier.”
Says Hillier: “We are certainly disappointed when anyone has to
depart the firm and the four who have left to go out on their own
have our best wishes for success. As with the dozen or so firms that
have been spawned from Hillier over its 35-year history, we are proud
that their experience here was broad enough in scope to enable them
to go out on their own.”
“Our education practice group is busy and continues to win new
projects under the leadership of Managing Principal Phil Dordai,”
says Hillier. Major new commissions include a new campus for a private
school in Pennsylvania, a dormitory for Goucher College in Maryland,
the new business school for Virginia Commonwealth University, a study
for the Fox School of Business at Temple University, Collin College
in Dallas, and major international schools in Dubai, Vienna, and two
locations in China.
At first the new group wasn’t having much luck finding
space that was not just a hum drum office. Then Genuone, a dotcom
at Mapleton Mills, gave its notice. Now Ikon.5 occupies part of the
Genuone space, 2,000 feet in the award-winning rehab design for an
older house, formerly the studio of Ford Farewell Mills and Gatsch
(Short & Ford).
Timing was right, says Holmes. “The projects we were involved
in were coming to stages where we could make a clean break without
harming a project or leaving a client in the lurch,” says Holmes.
“The only revenue we have now is the consulting work we are doing
with Hillier to make sure the projects we are working on are well
served and fluidly handed off to Hillier staff. We are continuing
to do that for the next number of months.”
Holmes says they look forward “to being able to choose when and
what we pursue. Hopefully we will be able to do that a little more
efficiently. At a big firm, it gets to be a numbers game. You have
to feed the big animal and sometimes it is harder to say no to
submitting
a proposal. Hopefully we will be able to choose which projects we
have a chance of winning and have a better hit rate.”
The drama of the bidding process is not to be underestimated.
Outsiders
don’t realize that architects might get shortlisted for maybe one
out of 10 projects on which they bid. “Some clients don’t realize
a bid could be a week or two weeks of full-time work for two or three
people,” says Holmes. “At Hillier, if we got shortlisted,
we won half of them.” A smaller firm can afford to work on smaller
projects, yet this practice can boast of big firm experience.
They also hope to stretch their design wings into other areas. At
Hillier, for example, they were obligated to turn over a university
contract for an office building, museum, or conference center, to
a company specialist. Now Holmes hopes to announce a high-end retail
contract soon.
They chose the name, the Greek word for image, out of sheer
exhaustion,
because they needed the name before they could sign a lease or order
phones. Most firms take the names or initials of the principals.
“I
spent days walking through all the references we could come up
with,”
says Holmes.
This company has no worries about online colleges eliminating the
need for brick and mortar institutions. “While some think
electronic
access will cause the eventual demise of the physical campus, we
believe
that campus environments promote the greatest synergy of understanding
between education, research, and society. And let’s be honest: what
18-year-old doesn’t want to go away to college and get away
from home?”
The five have no administrative assistants. Says Holmes: “We’re
very high on the totem pole, it’s just a very short totem pole.”
— Barbara Fox
Ikon.5 Architects, 864 Mapleton Road, Princeton08540. 609-919-0099; fax, 609-919-0088. Home page:www.ikon5architects.comTop Of PageAlso Gone From HillierAnother architect who left the Hillier fold, JamesGreenberg,left one big company to join another. A 1968 engineering graduateof Cornell with a master’s degree in architecture from Penn, Greenbergworked with John Clarke (now with Clarke & Caton) for the City ofTrenton in the late 1970s and had been at Hillier for two decades.Working in the New York, he was CIO for the national firm andoperationsdirector for the New York office.As managing principal of the 60-person Ehrenkrantz Eckstur & Kuhn(EE&K) Architects, Greenberg will manage projects in New Jersey, NewYork, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Shanghai. These projectsinclude master plans for new urban schools and the schools themselvesin Camden, Jersey City, and Newark, and at Rutgers in New Brunswick(www.eekarchitects.com).Top Of PageHillier’s PipelineAmong the 10 new hires at Hillier are six professionalsbased in Princeton:Jeffrey Willcox, 51, is the new vice president andnationaldirector of the Health, Wellness and Lifecare studio, which is basedin Princeton. He is currently expanding Hillier’s successfulhealthcarepractice into the Midwest. He has a business administration/marketingdegree from California State University.Karen K. Blose, 46, is general counsel, joining Hillierfrom the Washington Group International Inc. A graduate of MountHolyoke,she went to Duke University School of Law.George H. Swallow RA, 46, a project architect/labspecialistin the Science & Technology studio, is working on the UMDNJ CancerCenter. He has a BA in architecture from the University of Arizonaand an Associate in Architectural Engineering Technology fromWentworthInstitute of Technology.Meredith Lynn Bostwick, 24, is Bob Hillier’s architecturalassistant. She has a BS in architecture from Georgia Institute ofTechnology and an MA from Princeton University. She has also beenawarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for Cultural Arts and Policyconcerningrevolutionary campus design in Historical Black Colleges andUniversities.Diego del Castillo, an architectural intern in Hillier’sScience & Technology studio, is working on the Child Health Institute.Heis from Lima, Peru, where he went to Universidad Ricardo Palma, andis finishing his master’s degree at Cornell University.Marta Emilia Karamuz, an architectural intern in Hillier’sHealth, Wellness and Lifecare studio, is doing a project for theMedicalCenter at Princeton. She went to Columbia University and has amaster’sdegree from Princeton University.Founded in 1966, Hillier is New Jersey’s largest architecturefirm and has almost 300 people. In addition to its 200-personheadquartersin Princeton, the firm also has offices in Philadelphia; New York;Washington, D.C., Dallas and Newark. Ranked among the top five largestarchitectural firms in the nation, Hillier has worked on projectsin 41 states and 23 foreign countries and has been honored with morethan 250 awards for design excellence.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
