Читать книгу Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm - Patrick MacLeamy - Страница 55

As the San Francisco office grew, Hellmuth established a marketing office in Washington, DC to support his regular trips there to market to federal agencies. Setting up a marketing-only office is another way of growing and makes sense in a target-rich environment like Washington, where Hellmuth called regularly upon the General Services Administration (GSA), the State Department, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Smithsonian. His early efforts led to a State Department commission to design the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador.

Hellmuth visited Smithsonian officials often, and in 1965 secured the commission for a major new museum on the National Mall, the park connecting the Capitol building and the Lincoln Memorial. The space race was well underway, and Congress had appropriated money for a national air and space museum to house the nation's expanding collection of airplane and rocket artifacts.

The Smithsonian required a local associate architect for the work, and Hellmuth selected Petticord and Mills, successful Washington architects with previous experience on the National Museum of American History. The two firms worked together on the museum project, then merged, in 1975, creating a full service HOK office in Washington, DC. This works well as long as the two firms share a similar company culture. Obata designed the Air and Space Museum from St. Louis, making frequent trips to Washington to meet with Smithsonian officials.

Fatefully, by the time the design wound its way through the bureaucratic process and got approved, inflation had driven the construction cost well beyond the original congressional appropriation. The Smithsonian asked HOK to redesign the museum to fit within the original budget. Sometimes the best design solution comes from second chances. And sometimes it comes from an underling. This was one of those situations where HOK's unique belief in finding the very best solution—regardless of who it comes from—paid off. Chi Chen Jen, the Taiwanese-born designer who had evacuated so fast in that St. Louis earthquake, had an idea. He proposed an elegant assemblage of three large, skylit glass galleries for the display of aircraft and space memorabilia separated by four marble cubes for smaller exhibits. It was brilliantly simple, and Obata went with it.

Sometimes the best design solution comes from second chances. And sometimes it comes from an underling.

The Smithsonian dedicated the redesigned museum on July 1, 1976, at the height of the United States Bicentennial festivities, under the leadership of Director Michael Collins, the former astronaut who had journeyed to the moon on Apollo 11, in 1969. The National Air and Space Museum quickly became the most popular museum on the National Mall and earned praise in the architectural press, establishing a much-needed national reputation for both Obata and HOK. Any design firm that can nab a prominent commission early in its corporate life—then design an elegant solution—will benefit, as HOK did. It remains the most-visited museum in the United States, with 7.5 million visitors in 2016, for example.

FIGURE 5.1 National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC.

Source: Photo by George Silk. Photo courtesy of HOK.