Читать книгу Voices of Design Leadership - Ken Sanders - Страница 30

I first met Sharron van der Meulen in 1993, shortly after I joined ZGF Architects in Portland, Oregon. She is an amazingly talented interior designer, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with her on the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California, and the Conference Center for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In 2020, Sharron became Managing Partner of ZGF’s Portland office. She is the first woman to assume that role, following Bob Packard and Jan Willemse. (Jan remains an active Partner at ZGF; Bob retired in early 2022.) As Portland Managing Partner, Sharron guides marketing and interior design for a diverse portfolio of corporate workplace, law office, institutional, higher education, healthcare, commercial mixed use, and aviation projects.

ZGF Architects was originally founded in Portland in 1942 as Wolff and Phillips, then in 1954 became Wolff and Zimmer. In 1966, the firm became Wolff Zimmer Gunsul Frasca under the leadership of Norm Zimmer, Brooks Gunsul, and Bob Frasca. In 1991, ZGF was awarded the Architecture Firm Award by the American Institute of Architects, which recognized the firm for “creatively transforming client needs and aspirations into elegant, inventive architectural form, and establishing a standard of excellence and expectation of quality to which other firms aspire.”

ZGF has since expanded to six offices, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New York, and Vancouver, BC, Canada. The firm has also extended its reach of award-winning healthcare, research, corporate, and civic projects to clients including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Expensify, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Stanford University, US Department of State, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

One noteworthy ZGF project is Stanley Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Inside the building are the research laboratories where Dr. Jennifer Doudna and her team co-developed CRISPR, the gene-editing technology first used commercially for testing and diagnosis of COVID-19. Stanley Hall is a gold-standard example of how architecture can help sponsor impactful cross-disciplinary research.

High-performance sustainable design has also been a central tenet of ZGF’s practice. The firm’s first Living Building project, a new headquarters building for PAE Engineers in Portland, opened in 2021. Other net-zero projects include the Rocky Mountain Institute Innovation Center in Basalt, Colorado, and the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, California, among others.

Prior to her interview for this book, I last saw Sharron at Bob Frasca’s memorial service in 2018, where she delivered a beautiful eulogy to the man with whom she worked for over three decades. In her interview, she generously shares some of the leadership lessons she learned from Bob, as well as her own thoughts about ZGF’s future.

While working at ZGF, Sharron met her husband Peter, who continues to work at the firm as a Principal. They have a daughter Ella, who recently graduated from Chapman University in Orange, California. Readers will soon learn more about Ella’s talent as a soccer player!