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Part One: Architecture for Good

BLASPHEMY

Nothing requires the architect’s care more than the due proportions of buildings.

VITRUVIUS

Greg and I were midlevel architects on a Seattle firm’s design teams working on gargantuan architecture for sports and entertainment: football and soccer stadiums, basketball and hockey arenas, venues for performing arts and campus sports. For this firm, Greg and I even submitted a proposal for the main arena for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

Young and newly certified to practice, we were working on large-scale structures that many people would see, enter, and enjoy. For our age, we were fortunate to have influential roles in the Los Angeles satellite office.

After earlier stints where I had primarily designed custom residences, this shift to sports buildings was startling and thrilling. From designing structures for a family of three or four, I jumped to designing stadiums for thousands and thousands of spectators. Some large homes I laid out consumed twenty-five thousand square feet; a big-city sports arena complex can occupy over one million square feet. That’s a 4,000 percent shift in scale and material.

Perhaps because the Seattle partners in the firm wanted the high-profile pro league or major university work seen through their West Coast myopia, I lucked into a small Midwest college project that would become “mine.”

My assignment for the next three years would be a 400,000-square-foot convocation center for Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. The new building would contain a 10,000-seat basketball arena, a 30,000-square-foot conference center, a 700-seat banquet hall, a 500-seat dining hall, and supporting kitchens, offices, locker rooms, restrooms, storage and mechanical spaces, and all that a complex like that entails. Brand-new, blank slate, ground up. Mine to do.

Projects like this are typically staffed with a principal-in-charge (the executive team leader), a project manager (the seasoned architect), and a group of architects led by the creative efforts of a project designer. At the modest age of thirty-two, many years ahead of my career schedule, I was named project designer.

Yes, me.

And even though I wasn’t licensed in Ohio, architects without a license can practice if the firm they are with has licenses, so I was able to work in Ohio and later in Illinois in collaboration with a local firm.

The leaders of Xavier University warmly greeted us at the campus kick-off meeting. I dutifully followed in my place behind the leaders of the firm, as was proper. They would set the overall project goals, and I was to design it, and despite my cockiness, I was petrified. This wasn’t a ten-hour architectural licensing exam; this wasn’t a pier in a beach town, or a house. Small college or not, this was a big deal, for them and for me.

The principal-in-charge had bigger fish to fry, as he led architectural teams for NFL and NBA projects. A mere collegiate project couldn’t keep his interest. Then, in the first month of the project, the bean counters back in our West Coast office determined that the architectural fee being paid by Xavier didn’t cover the cost of the number-two person on the job, the project manager.

So I was left standing. One architect to do the work of three.

Limited experience.

Limited management resources.

What I did possess was determination. I was smart enough to figure things out as they came to me and dumb enough not to know when to be intimidated and scared. With no intention of becoming the road kill of corporate fallout and politics, I proceeded with keen ambition and irrational courage.

Every other week for over two years, Delta Airlines delivered me to Cincinnati, where I marched onto the Xavier campus accompanied by one supporting colleague. I ran meetings of dozens of campus leaders from seemingly every department and office: from the religious leaders of the campus to staffers in finance, athletics, administration, and facilities to alumni. Again, my ego and stupidity sheltered me from the fact that I should have been worried.

Though the job was overwhelming, my self-esteem ran high. I’m sure many in attendance at the campus meetings asked themselves, “Who is this youngster architect?” But with the rehearsed bravado in my presentations, I bulled my way through, undaunted.

The Cintas Center was ambitious and monumental and is still the largest building on Xavier’s campus. I dubbed my vision “a city within a city.” Many projects that propose new buildings near established sites involve having to build nearby but not within the institution’s current boundaries. Existing campuses, be they colleges, hospitals, or apartment complexes require either razing older structures or building out, in a parking lot or on a plot annexed across a street or stream. Before I visited Xavier, founded in 1831, I assumed that would be the case, that the land within the ancient walls would already be taken.

But the university fathers had vision, and several open areas on campus were available to me. Since I wasn’t to build on an outlying lot across from the campus, with few obstacles other than existing roads, I was forced to be more creative, more aware of the need for the project to blend into the campus. A city within a city.

I placed the Cintas Center in the heart of campus, tucking it against an eighty-foot-high hillside. This location served both an aesthetic and a practical purpose. The hillside as backdrop served to diminish the new center’s overwhelming size, and it allowed the arena to be entered from several levels at the top, middle, and bottom of the hill, easing the flow of ten thousand fans arriving at one time.

One of my favorite concepts for this project was to brand the building, to make it into its own sign. I chose to carve the school’s logotype into the massive fifteen-foot-tall, forty-five-foot-wide precast concrete panels of the exterior. Starting on one side and turning the corner, XAVIER, in eight-story-tall letters, was to be emblazoned permanently. And I’m proud to say that, although it was at first controversial, this design element is now an icon of the campus and the avatar of the Cintas Center’s Twitter feed.

But I had to sell the idea to a tough group.

After the meetings to listen to the needs of the campus constituents, I was to present my design informally to the Jesuit university’s president, James E. Hoff, SJ.

“Informally,” I was told by the president’s handlers. “Don’t worry,” they assured me. I didn’t know then that “Don’t worry” meant the opposite. I was still the young architect, eager to please and impress, and I usually took people at their word.

I sauntered into the administration building thinking I would be sitting in the cozy, historic president’s office on a comfy burgundy leather club chair, the president and I talking one-on-one. I imagined a delightfully intellectual conversation about buildings, education, young people, the past and future.

Instead, I was directed into a large, very formal chamber, a daunting dark-wood-paneled room that clearly represented the powers and traditions that had led the college for over 150 years. As I walked in, feeling like a cat ready to run at the first sign of trouble, a long table was getting fresh white linens. A huge floral arrangement dominated a side table on which steam trays, plates, and silverware were laid out. Above it hung a giant blue banner with the university’s seal in Latin, Vidit Mirabilia Magna, which I would learn later translates to “He has seen great wonders.” A dozen waiters stood along one wall in starched black-and-white uniforms.

To top it off, the president’s crest was being hung on the wall behind his high-backed chair.

This was no “informal” meeting. This was possibly the most formal setting in which I had ever presented. The lesson: There is no such thing as an informal meeting with a president.

I remained calm. My ego, my shield, protected me. As I unpacked and arranged my presentation in the middle of one long side of the table, the university’s leaders walked in, each in full black Jesuit garb. Fortunately, I had arrived early enough to set up a building model on the long table and cover it with a white cloth. Architectural presentation needs an element of theater, I had learned early on.

After each university leader arrived at his or her assigned chair around the table, President Hoff, in a black cassock and white collar, was quietly but dramatically ushered in; there’s theater in entering a room as well, it turns out. Settling in, they all stared at me, wondering when the architects, plural, were going to show up.

Without hesitation, I stood up and spun my vision about creating “a city within a city” for Xavier University. I spoke passionately about how their existing Collegiate Gothic style of architecture need not be formulaically followed in the design of the new Cintas Center. I held up my presentation boards in a calm and orderly manner, and then, like a magician—or was it a bullfighter?—I unveiled the miniaturized but, I thought, still impressive model of my design for the center.

Silence.

When I lifted off the roof of my model to reveal the basketball arena within, there were gasps. Literally. I couldn’t tell yet if they were from shock or delight.

As I wound down my comments, the leaders of the school wound up. Many questions were thrown my way, which is how it should be—a rational exchange, a give-and-take—but the volume and depth of inquiry were quite impressive, no doubt coming from a well of concern for their institution and concern about the too-young architect of a dramatic proposal for their home turf. The questions were politely put at first, but the heat continued to rise, among themselves and against me.

Besides questions about budget, construction, schedule, engineering, and permits, the main point of dispute was my aggressive proposal to reinterpret the proud Collegiate Gothic style represented by every other building on campus into a composition of clean modern lines and massive concrete forms. A consensus arose in the room not only that my idea should be revisited but that I, this solo architect from a big company out West, should be reconsidered.

I think I actually heard someone whisper not so quietly, “Blasphemy.”

Despite the impressive physical model, with its “concrete” walls and its little cars painstakingly glued in carefully measured spaces, there were no heads nodding in support of my vision, particularly not for my bold idea to deboss the giant letters of “Xavier” on the building’s facade.

I shrank against the onslaught. My vision of a grand structure turned into the image of an Asian kid surrounded by venerable white men in robes. Curiously, one even questioned, “Does he really speak English?” I was not only a bad architect; some in the room saw me as a blasphemous circus act speaking in tongues.

I had about ten seconds to think of something, anything, or be chased out of this hallowed room. Although I was sweating, I calmly declared, “This project is not about the past. This project looks toward the future. Gothic architecture is from centuries ago, and I envision a new world, a new future, and a new city within a city for Xavier University!”

Everyone gulped, then, one by one, turned their heads to the president for direction. The silence seemed to last a century of Xavier history.

President Hoff said steadily, “I like the words that you are saying, young man!”

And with that, the room broke into excitement and applause. The meal began. Wine was poured.

With a mere gesture of approval from the president’s hand alongside his direct and simple words, I was now a hero, a creative force to be reckoned with. My head couldn’t have grown bigger, and my ego could not have been more stroked.

The project opened in 1999 to accolades and national attention. In the arena of my design, in “my house,” the Xavier Musketeers regularly crushed competitors, distinguishing themselves as one of the country’s premiere college basketball programs.

At the groundbreaking, President James E. Hoff, SJ, released a statement: “When the Cintas Center is finally finished, we will continue to look back on Anthony Poon’s work with the highest regard. It was a pleasure for Xavier University to work with Anthony.”

Later President Hoff asked me to step out with him for a brief note.

“Yes, Mr. President?” I asked curiously.

He asked me to call him “Jim.”