- And number of distinguished leadership positions, as you might expect someone with that kind of history, including past president of the American Institute of Architects, past chancellor of the College of Fellows of the AIA, and in addition to that, former chairman of the National Institute of Building Sciences board of direction, is a fellow in the College of Healthcare Architects, a fellow in the American Institute of Architects, a fellow in the Health Facilities Institute.

All clear marks of distinction for a career well led.

And interestingly, for different lifetime achievement awards, the Texas Society of Architects, the College of Healthcare Architects, Healthcare Symposium, and AIA Dallas, that's a remarkable collection of markers for an outstanding career.

One of the things that's not mentioned on either of these gentlemen's bios is their extraordinary generosity, I'll come back to that right before I introduce them to you.

Both are Aggies, both are products of our architecture program.

Now Joe Sprague is formerly, now retired, senior vice president and director of Health facilities at HKS Dallas, these two gentlemen worked together for a bunch of years.

I met Joe in '77, if you can believe that, 1977, Joe gave me my very first research grant, and it's been a pleasure to know Joe and to follow his career and his leadership over a bunch of years.

Lots of history in Joe's career, probably he is best known for his work with the guidelines as they are known, the Facilities Guidelines Institute, producing guidelines now used by about 48 states as guidelines for how healthcare facilities should be designed and developed.

That's a remarkable reach, think about that for a moment.

Being associated with the organization that creates those documents.

Again, lots of leadership positions with the past presidency of the College of Healthcare Architects, twice, the past president of the Academy of Architecture for Health.

And again, fellow at AIA, fellow with the College of Healthcare Architects, fellow in the Health Facilities Institute.

These guys are giants in the field, if you haven't picked up on that.

Generosity is something that I mentioned earlier, some of you know about that personally, I had the great pleasure, after knowing these gentlemen for so many years, of having their names on my business cards here at A&M, for the last six years, as the holder of the Skaggs and Sprague chair in health facilities design.

And having known them for all of those years, to have their names on my card, was a privilege beyond anything I might have imagined along my career path.

These guys are special, I enjoy my time with them, I enjoy their wisdom, and I especially enjoy their hearts.

Would you join me in welcoming Ron Skaggs and Joe Sprague?

(audience clapping) - Great, thank you so much.

You're always so kind.

- Thank you Ray.

- And over exaggerate on us, but we would love it every minute of it.

Thank you.

We are delighted to be with each of you today, and over the years we've participated in a number of lectures through this lecture series on healthcare facilities.

And we've even lectured in the past on designing facilities worldwide and shown examples of our work throughout the world.

But today we're gonna take a different approach.

We will talk about how our success in health facility design has led to the establishment of an international practice, as I refer to here on the slide, and I just wanna start by saying, to work globally, an architectural firm must first have a strong grasp of the basics of architectural design in the United States.

And to begin talking about that, I've included and I have with me today, examples of the first edition and second edition of a book that is a strong reference book for understanding that how to design healthcare facilities within the United States.

The title of the book is "Building Type Basics for Healthcare Facilities," I'm holding up the second edition currently.

This is a compendium of all the parts of a hospital, and starts with an introduction with healthcare in general, but then gets into all the various departments in the hospital, which are called ancillary departments, gets into discussion of ambulatory care facilities, and the nursing units.

So I strongly recommend this book, it it was published by John Wiley, it can be purchased through them or it can also be purchased through Amazon or a lot of other websites that are carrying books with them.

And related to that, a huge factor for success in healthcare design is establishing a balance, a balance between functional operations and healing environments.

Joe Sprague will later discuss the evolution of guidelines for designing world class health facilities, later in our discussion.

But related to American healthcare, I would like to indicate that it essentially grew out of what is referred to as western medicine, which originated in Europe, several centuries back, and is considered the gold standard for the kind of facilities that countries throughout the world wish to develop.

Realizing that there are other forms of medicine in other cultures.

Keep that in mind though, there's a desire to incorporate a lot of what is considered western medicine.

So we first began associating with firms in other countries, and 'cause it was clearly apparent to us that an in depth knowledge of each country's differences was critical to ultimate success.

And related to that, there are a variety of factors that are shown on this slide here that come to play when you're designing internationally.

And I'm not gonna read the list to you, you can see the list, but I'm gonna comment on a few of them.

A/E selection for example, it varies from country to country, and the way you're selected in the United States quite often is very different than how you're selected in China, or in the United Kingdom and so forth.

Codes are different, payment methods vary significantly, and Joe Sprague will discuss the impact of codes in government role that's listed up here later on.

Many countries, particularly in Western Europe, parts of Asia and the Middle East, can accommodate the technology that's referred to here, but in many developing cultures, accommodating that technology is very difficult.

So there's all these differences that come to play when we try to apply the approach to US medicine in other countries.

Now, about our international practice.

HKS over the years has established seven functioning offices outside our US borders.

We have 21 offices in the United States, that we've made a big commitment to global architecture.

And we strongly believe that the head of each office must be from that country, that the head of that office must be fluent in the language and knowledgeable of the culture laws and construction practices in that environments.

So I'd like to review those offices with you if I may.

Our first office being close to us here in the United States was established in Mexico City, Mexico, because we had been selected to design several facilities for American British Cowdray Hospital in Mexico City.

And one of the early lessons we learned working in Mexico is that they do not build from as complete a set of drawings or plans as we do in here in the US, and many of the details are resolved during construction.

So we adjusted accordingly.

There must be a willingness when working internationally to adjust accordingly to the practices in that country, and not force our practices upon that country.

Our second office was established in London.

Joe and I were both actively involved in establishing that office, I was in the Mexico office.

And there we joined, established a practice there, which is serving all of UK and Europe as well, but primarily to support the practice in that the National Health Service was in establishing public funded hospital facilities.

The country used a procurement system that incorporates programming, design, construction, operations, and financing all under one umbrella entity.

It was originally referred to as private financing of initiative, shortly called PFI, but it's now more commonly referred to as what's discussed around the world as public private partnership, PPP.

So all these things are put together in one entity, including the financing and operations, and then that team is selected to design the hospital.

This required us to bring design build experience that we had to play and we were typically under contract to the contractor, which a large construction that he primarily developed these facilities, Such funds are not available to the architect quite often until financial closing.

So procuring timely payment for services rendered can be a very difficult process, for its so it's not for the faint of heart to work with under this process.

Our third office was established in Chennai, India, which we later moved to New Delhi, and I'd like to ask Joe to speak to that briefly, since he was very instrumental in establishing that office.

- Yes, when I was in graduate school here at Texas A&M, I had a colleague that graduated in my same class that was from India, and we, excuse me, we had an opportunity to go to India, which I always wanted to travel internationally as best as I could, and so we went to Chennai, and had the opportunity to see several facilities in the country of India.

In traveling around we ended up in New Delhi, which is the capital and where all the public health standard design, control, and construction was managed out of.

And there was a doctor, Chandrashekhar was his name, he was both an architect and a PhD in public health, so having had that opportunity to talk to Dr. Chandrashekhar, we were able to talk to numerous class II hospitals throughout the state of India, and ended up designing several facilities there.

Likewise, something similar when we opened the office in Tokyo, when professor Nagasawa from University of Tokyo, was an architect specializing in healthcare, was interested in being part of a worldwide system of learning.

- Thank you Joe, and we'll talk about Tokyo here a little later.

Our fourth office was established in Shanghai, China.

I made several trips over to China, there were staff in our office that were from China, and I might mention, the first two projects we actually designed were in Taiwan, but then we ended up doing a lot of work in China, and established the office in Shanghai.

And there's a common practice there for architects to be selected through design competition, teamed with the Chinese design Institute.

And it can be either a private institute or it can be affiliated with the university.

The winner of the competition is usually awarded the project, and then second and third place receive stipends, to help fund part of what it goes into preparing the competition.

I might indicate firms are really working hard to get these jobs, and they always spend more than what the stipend plays pays, but if you get the project, it pays off.

So it's, again, not for the fainthearted.

And although China is very interested in design aspects from the US, there are variety of cultural and medical practice differences that must be addressed when working in China.

For example, in pharmacy, in the US we design for the oral administration of drugs, in China, many drugs are administered intravenously and that requires providing a large number of transfusion stations, just as an example.

Our fifth office was established first in Abu Dhabi for the Middle East, and then was moved to the United Arab Emirates, that's within United Arab Emirates, and then was moved to Dubai, which is also in that location.

Although our first project for Middle East was designed by our US staff only, and was Hadassa Medical Center at the Ein Karem campus part of the Jerusalem Israel, where Hebrew University School of Medicine is located.

We worked in close association with Spector Amisar Architects based in Jerusalem.

So we've worked in essentially all the Islamic Middle Eastern countries.

One cultural factor affecting design in some of the Islamic countries is a requirement to separate male and female, not only separated for accommodations, but separation from view.

So that's something that has to be very carefully considered in the planning and design of hospitals in that locations.

I'm gonna move on to our sixth office, which is one of our newer offices.

Offices it's in Singapore, Malaysia.

It also serves our work in Australia, and the two projects at the top, the one on your left, and the one on the right are both children's hospitals that we designed.

The one on the left is in Perth on the western side of the continent of Australia, the one on the right is Melbourne, the capital of the country, and on the eastern side of the nation.

But then we're actually doing a lot of work in Malaysia and other parts of that area of Asia as well, and this is primarily a healthcare office.

Joe referred to Tokyo.

There we go, whoop went too quick.

There we go.

Sorry about that.

There was not getting it to work for a moment.

And that's our most recent office is located in Tokyo over, even though Joe first approached opening years ago and the healthcare side didn't come to play, our sports group was selected to design, the Hokkaido major league baseball park and we're now designing the new arena for Toyota, and so it's working as a sports office, but working with Dr. Nagasawa, we expect that we'll be involved in healthcare there very soon.

We also considered opening an office in South Paulo, Brazil for South America, although we have an office in Mexico City for Central America that does reach into South America as well.

We maintained an address there for a short period, but this is another thing you run into, the financials are a big issue in working internationally, as they are working here in the US, I don't wanna minimize that, but the laws in Brazil required all income to remain in the country.

That did not fit with our business plan to be honest.

So, we decided we're not gonna have an office in Brazil.

Now, there were other parts of South America we're still considering, but haven't come to a conclusion on that yet.

One major, I'm gonna leave it here on the Tokyo slide for a minute, but I want to just end before I turn it to Joe.

One major difference in healthcare design in the US, as opposed to the rest of the world is the design of the nursing unit.

And the reason for that, and Joe will be discussing this further when he talks about the Facility Guidelines Institute, is the US requires all single bedrooms in all of their facilities, with a few exceptions, of course, Joe can clarify that, most countries around the world still provide care in multi-bed settings, or in some cases there's a mixture of private and semi-private beds.

For example, I talked about Hadassa Medical Center a while ago, they require through their national health insurance laws, that it be a mixture of private and semi-private beds, two-thirds semiprivate, one third private.

So we provided the private, but we did convince them that we designed the semiprivate in a way to where it's kinda looked like two clusters of space, one patient facing this way, and the other patient facing that way to where it was kinda like being in a private setting but in a semiprivate room.

So there are ways to be innovative as you approach these projects, considering the laws that exist in the different countries.

So now I'm gonna turn it to Joe, that's a general overview of working in foreign countries, and where we're located, and doing that work, and he's gonna talk about, and I think there was an article passed out, I don't know if it was or not, but if it wasn't, don't worry about it.

Did y'all receive an article that we wrote?

Joe and myself and George Mann authored an article on extreme climates, so keep that in mind, if you're working in Saudi Arabia, it is a very hot climate, and so dealing with that is important.

If you're working in Siberia, it's a very cold climate and you're dealing with thermal transfer and issues as that.

So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Joe to just make a few comments on that, and then move to FGI.

- Ron and I have been a partner in healthcare and architecture for many years, and we have enjoyed each other's company in many occasions, and it's always my pleasure to speak with Ron.

We always start with history.

when we talk about design, and I'm sure you've heard of Florence Nightingale.

Florence Nightingale had all of the patients in wards, there were just multi-beds in the same area, they did that for several reasons, they didn't have the staffing, they didn't have the ability to take care of patients in a single bedroom unit.

The US Public Health Service in Rockville, Maryland started 30 years ago in writing standards for hospital design.

And as an incentive, they offered construction cost for hospitals who could prepare a document that would meet their standards.

The public health service had physicians, nurses, architects, engineers, and they were very much interested in the total environment of design.

What was designed at the time were 6, 4, 2, and maybe single bedrooms and intensive care.

When the Hill-Burton stopped being funded, a group called the Facility Guidelines Institute was created.

There were three people that went to Parklawn in Silver Springs, Maryland, and ask if they would consider having FGI create standards to follow up on the Hill-Burton requirements.

That was Armand Burgun, Doug Erickson, and myself, we were very fortunate to have an approval by that, by which we then created an organization that was very similar to the public health service of multidiscipline experts from medical, architectural, engineering, to serve in a voluntary capacity.

The American Institute of Architects come in architecture for health, of which Ron and I both have been involved with throughout our career, had individuals that were vital in helping us perform and get this credibility noticed.

So we established this voluntary institute program called FGI, again, made up of a multidisciplined group of individuals.

The notion was, and as you'll see, Ron, I think you have a slide.

- Yeah, I thought you were gonna talk about this briefly, but I'm gonna go onto that slide.

- Okay.

- This is just a whole list, I mentioned hot and cold, but there's flooding, there's hurricanes, there's fires, there's even bombing and chemical things in war and in terrorism.

So all these things have to be thought of when you're designing facilities internationally.

So with that, I'm gonna move on to Health Facilities Institute.

- Okay.

Okay, there are three guideline documents, I have the hospitals here, we've done other publications as Ron has mentioned you, on health facility planning, design, and construction, to help people who want through as the American Society of Healthcare Engineering of the American Hospital Association published those documents.

But essentially the guidelines is written by an interdisciplinary committee over a four year cycle, and there's public comment period, there's a period by which there's a public review, and there's multiple committees that work throughout the four year cycle to develop the document, of prime concern because wards were not the way to go.

The biggest thing was when we went to Rockville, Maryland, and convinced the Public Health Service to allow single bedrooms.

There was an argument we can't afford to have that, that's for a sepsis, infection control, occupancy, economies, staffing, we didn't have the staffing at that point in time, but we started having staffing that were able to provide quality of care in single bedrooms.

And so the Facility Guidelines Institute was created to establish minimum requirements for hospitals, for outpatient facilities, and for support facilities.

And to this day, the current edition is just out on the street now, the 2022, and to this day it is continued by the same leadership, Mr. Burgun and myself have retired, Doug Erickson is now the president and CEO of FGI, and they are embarking on the next four year cycle, with a whole list of requirements to update the thinking of all the areas that we have in the 300 page document of the 2018, now 22, guidelines.

I guess the real focus of the importance of it is that the guidelines need to be based upon a functional program, you have to understand before you design a building, what the function is, how big it is, how many there are, how many departments, how many staff, what's availability of technology, what's availability of maintenance, what's availability of material supply.

It's a very, very complex system when you design a hospital, it's not like a house, or office building, or any other occupancy.

In fact, with the exception of prisons, healthcare facilities are the most restricted occupancy type by codes and standards.

- [Ron] Maybe nuclear plants too.

- Oh, may it, Good point though.

- [Ron] But I'm not sure they're under codes and standards.

(both laugh) - We'll see.

So the functional piece is great.

The space guidelines are, you have to have adequate space to have the function achieved and the staff provided.

And the new concept at that time was safety risk assessment.

Everything, you don't want a patient coming to a hospital to get sick, you want the hospital to get them well.

So everything in the hospital should be designed with a safety risk assessment in mind.

The FGI gives you tools for safety risk assessment throughout the document.

This is the document here, I think you see the picture up there, but you can see mine are, I've got it's dog-eared and I use it every day in the design of projects that require the guidelines.

The bottom line is that, if you want to have Medicare and Medicaid pay for projects, and facilities, and services, and you want to have a license by a state every, I think 48 states reference the guidelines, then you have to follow them, because if you don't, and you won't become accredited, and any hospital, any hospital has to be accredited by The Joint Commission.

Once they're accredited, then they can get a license, they can get reimbursed, and they can get all of the care evaluated from the federal government, which pays for it all in the end.

- And Joe, if I may, I'm just gonna tag on to bring this to an end now.

The countries throughout the world that have hospitals designed for them, they want to be accredited, and the major accrediting agency in the world is here in the United States.

So that's why they are so interested in us bringing what we do in the United States to other countries.

But, there's one thing we want to keep in mind and I think, are we about on time here?

- [Roy] Doing great.

- This is a quote that came from the Global Health Council, and we apply this when we go to any country 'cause we think this is extremely important.

You can be the attitude, oh we're gonna go there and help them, we're gonna show them how it should be done.

That is the wrong attitude in designing in another country, but they say here is, "When it comes to global health, there's no them, it's only us."

And so we keep that in mind and we work with a lot of firms in other countries, some of them have worked in our country, and if we need to realize, we are international architects, we're working together for the good of mankind, and that's the goal of all of us.

So with that, we're ready for questions.

- If you have a question, we invite you to come forward to the podium to make your question clear and so that we can get a good audio recording of the question to go in the archive.

Any questions from those who are present?

- And Ron and Joe, this fascinating presentation, giving an overview about what you have done in the past several years, to have on the international business and also the guidelines as well.

So my question is that we have students over here, who's thinking about starting their business, who's thinking about joining firms like HKS, and also who's gonna finish their PhD, joining university or research institutions.

When you look back to your career, you are fascinating leaders in the industry, writers and denoted architects.

So, what would be your recommendations for their career path, or what should they do in the future to have a successful career?

What are your recommendations?

- [Ron] May I start Joe?

- [Joe] Please.

- Well I think the first thing to do is to really determine what your makeup is, and where do you want to spend your day.

Now in my case, I came to architecture school here at Texas A&M 'cause I wanted to be an architect.

So therefore my pathway was always in mind, was becoming an architect, that means you needed to get an accredited degree, you needed to become licensed, to become licensed, you needed to get experience, and then you continued on into the practice of architecture, which included the first part of what was mentioned by professor Lu, and that is operating and starting a business, and that's a side note, I'll come back to after Joe gives in the answer he has, but if your interest is to go into academia and research, there are some firms, but very few, that are strong in the research side, then you're probably gonna want to focus more on going that direction.

I still think it's good to be a registered architect if your degree is in architecture, if you do that, but it's not necessarily a requirement, what's more important is having the PhD, which some of you were getting.

So I think it really boils down to where you wanna spend your day, but if you're coming to HKS to be an architect, we expect that you become a registered architect or you will not advance in the firm, and if currently at this university, that means you need to go get a master's degree, which you can get here in architecture, or you get it somewhere else in healthcare architecture, if it's healthcare.

I think that's in the process of being changed here to where a accredited degree can be made available here beyond graduate school, time will tell on that.

Joe, you want to add anything?

- Yeah, I think it's very important, Ron makes the point, that you have to get your professional degree first and become licensed eventually, you don't have to do it right out, you have to have like three years of experience once you get your professional degree to get licensed in most states.

But, if you have a passion for health, you want to be an architect, you have a passion for health, then you need to get involved with the system, join the American Hospital Association, join the American Society for Healthcare Engineering, become involved in their annual meetings, go to the meetings, listen to the meetings, go with your colleagues, there are physicians, nurses, engineers, architect, construction people, they're all there wanting to deliver healthcare facilities, as the best possible design in the shortest period of time, at the lowest cost, and if you go there, sharing your discipline with theirs, you can learn very quickly, where the passion starts to come to your practice as an architect to become specialized in healthcare.

You have the credentials, then you have the experience, and then you have the knowledge of the system that hospitals expect an architect to perform in.

The architects that don't do that aren't hospital architects, and that's why you have ACHA, and AIA specializing in healthcare design, and Ron and I both have chosen that for our career.

- [Ron] I want to come back to your question about, you said starting a business.

- [Lu] Yeah, that's right.

- That was part of the question, but the first related to what Joe just said, I've always said you're an architect first, you're a specialist in architecture second, just like in medicine, you're a physician first and then you might be a cardiologist or a surgeon or whatever second.

So it's important that you get the basics of architecture, and then you focus on the specialty side.

starting a firm that is another totally, it could be an all day subject, and it doesn't just happen that easily.

So I hope I'm not getting off track here, but I think of the founder of our company, Harwood K. Smith, which is what his in initials of his Harwood K. Smith is HKS, graduated from Texas A&M in 1936, and he had this goal that he's gonna start his own firm, you had to have experience for three years in a firm, learning all the different aspects of architectural practice, so he went through that by working with three different firms, each one year, so he could learn all the different building types.

Then he sat out and started his firm, and it took him a long time, he started out designing houses, and then went for that to schools and apartment complexes, and all ended up doing office buildings and brought us in to do healthcare, but that's another subject.

It's not that it's so easy to do that these days, it's better to go to work with a firm for a while, understand the business of architecture before you go out and start your own.

And there's a lot of issues related to the business school side of things, that you begin to realize, you wish you'd gotten some of that while you were in school, but you have to develop in on your own, and if you're smart enough to be an architect, you can develop it on your own.

So are there any other questions?

- This already good comments and I know you, you can go on, and on, and on and on these topics, and one more question if you don't have questions?

Okay, go come on.

- [Autumn] Don't you have one?

No, just that, come one.

- [Ron] Looks like there's two more questions, how much more time do we have?

I talk too long.

- We have 11 minutes.

- We have time.

- [Ron] Okay good.

- Howdy, my name is Autumn Leveridge, and I am a class of, Fightin' Texas Aggie class of 1998 and 2013, and I am back here as a professor of practice in the civil engineering department.

Gentlemen, it's so good to see you guys again, as you were talking about relationships in the different projectS that you worked on and you had the slide that said "hey it's important, it's the focus of us," it's how are we working in teams together with different stakeholders from across the world.

I know that we have several international students here in the audience and several of those who may be watching online, and we come from different backgrounds.

So, can you talk just a little based on how your experiences and these philosophies have helped to enhance our respective country's national priorities?

- I might just say one thing before, Ron will probably give a better answer than I, but Autumn and I have a similar background in that we were in the medical service core of the US Army Surgeon General's Office.

- Joe's trying to exclude me but go ahead Joe.

(audience laughing) - And I learned everything that I know from Autumn and from Ron, so.

- I reported the duty to Joe in the Army Surgeon General's office, but I got out to start an architectural firm back to Zhipeng's question or start a healthcare practice, and Joe went on to become a lieutenant colonel, and you are a lieutenant colonel, right?

Okay, but I'm getting you off the subject.

Go ahead, Joe.

- No, that's just what I wanted to say, because if you have something you love and I was just so blessed and fortunate to get a commission in the Medical Service Corps because that's where I really learned how to design hospitals, it's Walter Reed, Fitzsimmons, Tripler, class II hospitals worldwide, and it just opened the doors in my eyes, and I got so passionate about healthcare that it was my career commitment from there.

- One of the words that you used in your question was relationships, and I think in any business the key to success is relationships, positive relationships, negative relationships result quite often in losing that business.

And particularly when you're working internationally, remember that you are a guest of that host country, when you're there providing your services.

And you're not there to direct what's going on, you're there to be a servant, to serve the needs of that particular hospital or health facility, and that's why it's so important to have, that's why we choose to do it., and each of our offices have someone that's from that country, as a key part and a leader of the team.

Now quite, it can be where you don't have to have an office in that country, when we did our first project in Mexico City, we associated with a firm in Mexico City and it kind of bothered our designer, because as I mentioned, there's a different design approach there, when we turned over our drawings and they were involved in this in design process to them, they totally changed our design.

We came back and said, well there are some things we need to adjust here, but we didn't say, why did you change our design?

That's our design, you cannot change our design, we worked with them to bring it together to where it was both of our designs, and I think it turned out to be a better project.

I could go on, and on, on that, but it's a give and take and you need to work as a team, and I will say this, language is the biggest barrier, because I speak English, many of the people in other countries also speak English, but they're native tongue they prefer to speak in, and sometimes translations, you think they may get lost, but in my experience that's not the case, 'cause most of them know what we're seeing, we just don't know what they are saying, and I've got to the they side, and I don't wanna talk about the they side, it's us side, so.

- [Autumn] Thank you.

- I don't know if you want to add to that, you've been all over the world.

- Well I, I guess maybe a follow on is like you said, there are design ideas that come from everybody that's part of the team, and then kind of into the, how those are implemented into national healthcare systems, were there any kind of ideas that you guys saw on some of those design teams, that you saw other countries that said, "Hey, you know, kind of like we have the Facility Guidelines Institute that they adopted some of the things from the design experiences?

- Well I'll go back to Hadassa Medical Center.

We were designing based on traditional mechanical electrical systems, and they said, "Well have you ever considered using these kinds of systems?"

And we knew they were prevalent in Europe, but we hadn't really used them in the United States, and we said, "Well let us look into that."

We came back , and now we're using them in the United States on projects.

That's one example I think what you're bringing up, yeah.

We all have good ideas and we need to as a team, do the best we can with those ideas.

- [Autumn] Thank you gentlemen.

- Thank you.

- [Ray] Thanks, Autumn, please.

- Good afternoon.

My name is Cynthia and I am the administrative coordinator for the Center for Health Systems and Design, and I'm also your friendly Zoom moderator, so I have a question from Zoom.

It is from Professor George Mann, who wishes he could be here today but unfortunately couldn't join us.

His question is, "Excellent talk, can you reassure the students that they will learn a great deal in time?

But in the meantime please discuss the importance of attitude in the day-to-day operation.

- George, I wish I could see you here face to face, I have interviewed a lot of students over the years, and I of course look at their portfolio, and I look at their GPA or GPR, whichever it's called, and that's a factor in all of it, but the main thing I look at is attitude.

And not only an attitude that they're a team player, that they don't have what I call the I disease.

I particularly get upset if everything is I and never we, in what they're presenting.

And I'm so I know in Professor Mann studios that students work together as teams, so that's a strong element with me when I'm looking at it.

But attitude is one of the most important things for being a successful architect, is having a positive attitude as opposed to a negative attitude.

Actually I had one young, I'm probably getting very way off base here 'cause I know this on PBS, but one young lady came in in flip-flops and shorts to interview, and that may be okay to some people, but it wasn't to me, and I explained to her that that was not the kinda attitude I think a person should have when they're going in to look for employment.

So Joe, I don't know if I left anything for you.

- Well, I think attitude is probably the most important thing, energy level, commitment, and obviously you gotta present yourself as a professional, you can't come in as this young lady was dressed, you need to look like you know what you're talking about.

Even though you may not know what you're talking about, you need to look like you know what you're talking about.

And if you do that, then people will believe what you have to say, because if you don't have the convincing presentation and presence, people aren't gonna listen to you.

So I think all of that is important in communicating, and Professor Mann knows this so well, thank you so much for the question.

- [Ron] I might just tag on, have we got a little bit more time?

- [Cynthia] Looks like we got two minutes.

- Two minutes, oh, okay.

The question again, back to starting a business, I think really what Zhipeng was talking about there is the fact that when you go into the practice of architecture, it's not practice.

Certainly, you're improving, so you're practicing to improve, but it's a business of architecture, and if you don't stay in business, you're not gonna get to practice architecture, because you have to have the projects to do the work.

So years ago, the founder of our current firm, who I mentioned earlier, Harwood Smith defined what he thought the business of architecture was, it's so simple that I hesitate to even mention it, but the first one was get work, that gets back to relationships, it gives back to attitude.

If you don't get the work, you can't do the work.

So keep that in mind.

Architectural work doesn't just walk in the door, you have to go about getting that work.

A lot of people call that marketing.

Second thing is doing the work and doing it well.

And in the past that was called practicing architecture.

I think there's a lot more to it than just the word practice, is a fine word, but it's really knowing how to put a building together, it's knowing how to design functionally, how to design for aesthetics and all those things, which you learn in school to some extent.

But then the last one, and this is one that people used to think was a dirty word, but it's definitely not, and that's to make a reasonable profit, 'cause to do the first two you, if you don't do the first two, you won't do the third, and the third if you don't make a reasonable profit, you're still not gonna be in business.

And so that's something that architects and other businesses have to deal with on a daily basis.

So if you don't have an attitude that supports getting work, doing the work well, and making a profit, then you may have difficulty in that profession.

So I'm gonna end on that.

Any other questions?

- I think we're just about out of time.

That's a wonderful note to end on.

Thank you both, it's always a special treat to be with y'all.

How about one more thank you for our guests?

(audience applauding) - [Ron] Thank you.

- I hope you'll do tune in next week.

We have another lecture next Friday, we look forward to seeing you then.

Until then, have a great week.

Thanks so much.

- [Speaker] Thank you.

(upbeat music)