Dialogues: Kristine Fallon

Kristine K. Fallon is a licensed architect and pioneer in applying information technology to architecture, engineering, and facility management since the 1970s. She founded Kristine Fallon Associates, Inc. (KFA) in 1993 to focus on the use of information technology in the design and construction industry. She has helped architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms, as well as corporate and governmental facilities groups nationwide evaluate and implement technology systems. She also developed and taught a graduate level course entitled “Computer Integrated Project Delivery” at Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering’s Master of Project Management Program.

Fallon has followed the evolution of BIM since the 1990s, when she developed academic programs using advanced modeling products, produced a white paper for Bentley Systems, evaluated the maturity and scalability of BIM systems for the Spallation Neutron Source project at Oak Ridge National Lab, and consulted for Revit Technology prior to their initial product release. She has advised many owners on BIM, including the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Institutes of Health, the Capital Development Board of Illinois, and the Public Building Commission of Chicago.

In 1995, Kristine Fallon was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in recognition of her achievement in enhancing the technical proficiency of the profession. In late 2017, Fallon turned over the reins of her organization to Gregory A. Bush Jr., who started working for KFA in 2001. In 2018, KFA celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and the retirement of Kristine Fallon. In 2021, she established the IAWA Kristine Fallon Prize at Virginia Tech to research important contributions made by women at large architecture firms.

IG: Good morning Kristine. We are going to conduct the oral history in chronological order. When and where were you born?

KF: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1949.

IG: What day?

KF: January 28.

IG: I’d like to know more about your family.

KF: My father’s name was William. He was an insurance investigator. He worked for a company that became Equifax, but it wasn’t that at the time.

My mother Kathleen (née O’Connell) Fallon worked on and off throughout my childhood. I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother as a result.

IG: Where did you grow up?

KF: I grew up in Sayville on Long Island. It’s about halfway out on the South Shore.

IG: Do you have any particular memories of growing up in that area?

KF: It’s an area where both my parents grew up, so I had a lot of family there. The more interesting part is that it is where you access Fire Island from, so I spent a lot of childhood summers on Fire Island. My grandmother had a house there for a while. My aunt and uncle had a house there. When I was a teenager, I also used to go over with friends.

IG: Do you still go to the area?

KF: I have been back twice since I left the East Coast, and that was just a few years ago. It was interesting to see what had changed and what hadn’t. I was just sure that one of the houses that my uncle built in the 1950s at Fire Island Pines would be gone, and it was still there. I was amazed.

IG: Do any of your family members still live in the area?

KF: Yes, that’s why I went back. I was visiting some cousins who have a place on Fire Island.

IG: Do you have any siblings?

KF: I am an only child.

IG: Tell me about where you went to school.

KF: I went to St. Lawrence School, a Catholic grammar school, and then public high school, Sayville High School, where I took a very rigorous academic program.

IG: Can you explain more what you mean by a rigorous academic program?

KF: Well, I always took more courses than those that were required, and at that time, New York State used to have special classes for smart kids, so I was always in the classes for smart kids. They also did the New York State Regents Exams. There was a lot of rigor and standardization in the curriculum and things like that.

IG: Were there any classes that stood out to you of that program, or any type of art or science classes that you felt particularly connected to?

KF: My family did not encourage me to take things like art electives, so I was taking French and Latin, and math and science. I never liked science very much. I was very good at math, and very good at English and writing.

IG: Was there anything during that early education that related more to architecture?

KF: Not in high school, at all. But it was being at Fire Island, in the fact that my uncle was working with contractors to design and build. He did two houses on Fire Island. There were many, many people in the arts on Fire Island.

I remember one family that had two children a little younger than me. He was a very well-known textile designer in New York, and a friend of textile designed Bill Stark. His mother-in-law was an illustrator for one of the home magazines, like Better Homes and Gardens. They built these houses on the dunes overlooking the ocean and talked a lot about their design concepts for them.

One summer, one of my mother’s jobs was in the real estate office at Fire Island Pines, and one of the things that she was responsible for was when people came to rent a house, she would meet them at the ferry. That was the only way to get there, and because there were no cars, you had to provide a wagon. I used to accompany my mother as the wagon puller, so I got to see a lot of very nice houses that people were renting for some period of time. I think it was really Fire Island that sparked my interest in architecture.

IG: You graduated from high school in 1966.

KF: Yes. I was valedictorian and graduated with the second highest academic average in the history of the school, which graduated its first class in 1895.

IG: After your graduation, you went to Georgetown University. Did you explore other universities? What was that process?

KF: Well, it’s a funny thing. I don’t think women today realize how little women of my generation were prompted to consider a career. I could be wrong. I don’t know about Carol Ross Barney or Margaret McCurry, who seemed to have been motivated very young, but for the most part, people didn’t ask girls what they wanted to do when they grew up or encourage them to really think about that. Most people thought, “Well, you’re smart, you’ll be a teacher.” Many people thought higher education was wasted on women, because their “career” would be as a wife and mother. My family was interested in me becoming a writer. I think that’s what they thought I would do, and I thought, “Well, if I was going to be a journalist, I would like to be a foreign correspondent.”

I got early placement at Georgetown in the French Department. At that time, they had a School of Languages and Linguistics, and it was one of the few schools that admitted women at Georgetown at that time.

IG: Did you ever consider any other university that might offer similar programs in the US?

KF: I visited Radcliffe but I didn’t like their language program and they didn’t like me. Northwestern accepted me in their Medill School of Journalism, and I was offered scholarships to a number of local colleges, such as Hofstra. As I recall, graduating with a Regents Degree automatically qualified me for admittance anywhere in the New York State University system.

IG: You started in 1966 in the French Department at the School of Languages and Linguistics. Did you ever consider other languages?

KF: I did study a little bit of German. To graduate from the School of Languages and Linguistics, you had to be fluent in two foreign languages. My first foreign language was French. I’m still pretty fluent in that. When I graduated from Georgetown, I spoke it so well, French people couldn’t tell I wasn’t French, which is something for an American.

IG: That is an accomplishment for anybody.

KF: Yes, and my Spanish was quite fluent too when I graduated. French, I’m still pretty good at. Spanish, I’ve been reduced to tourist Spanish at this point.

IG: Were there any aspects during the program that stood out, whether it was a particular class, professor, or any other aspect outside the classes?

KF: I was very active in the peace movement during the Vietnam War, and so that had an influence on me. It was a discouraging influence really, but in any case, I did a lot of vigils and marching until it got violent. It wasn’t very violent until the very end of the ’60s. When it got violent, I stopped participating. I’m really a pacifist at heart.

What else at Georgetown? I was always, “I can do more, and I can do better,” so I took a graduate level course in French theater, and that professor talked about set design and the visual aspects of theater. I suppose that contributed to my interest in the visual environment. I remember that I was very disappointed in how really uninspired the newer buildings in downtown DC were.

The other interesting thing about the French Department is that they took a French pedagogical approach, which is to say, “We are going to do this for the next six weeks. We are going to study seventeenth-century literature. What was the political situation in the seventeenth century? Who were the great artists? Who were the great musicians? What great buildings or monuments were built? who were the great writers, poets, et cetera?” That is not the way anything was taught in the US, but I found that interesting.

IG: Were there any study abroad programs related to your degree?

KF: I did not participate in any. I did take a year off to go to an experimental school that was part of the New York State University system. Jim Baez was one of the advisors to the program. It was very funky. It was very experimental; it was very bizarre. I took the “Ways of Being” course with a writer, and one of the things he was very, very adamant about was thinking critically. I had had a very standard education where you memorized everything, and the French are very much like that too. Language is very much about memorization, so that was a nice break. I did that my junior year, but it was a little too weird, and I went back to Georgetown after that.

IG: You graduated from Georgetown University in 1970.

KF: Right.

IG: What happened afterwards? Did you stay in DC? Did you look for work there?

KF: First of all, it was a very strange ending of my final year, because it was the murder of the students at Kent State. Georgetown just closed a month early, and said, “You get whatever your grade is at this point.” I was sort of happy, because I think I got out of something like four 20-page papers, but it was a non-closure closure at the graduation. I didn’t feel like I had really completed the work for the degree.

At that point, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I don’t know why I had moved away from the journalism idea. I think probably because I started to work on the school newspaper at Georgetown, and I didn’t like the politics there. A lot of people who went to Georgetown at the time I did became correspondents for The Washington Post and other newspapers. That was a real career path, but somehow, I flubbed that.

After the abrupt end of my senior year, I sold encyclopedias during the summer and went to Europe for six weeks on that money. Then, I came back and my aunt, the one at Fire Island, had been in the fashion industry. She was a fashion copywriter, and I went into working at a department store as an assistant buyer and floor manager. I did that for a few years but became bored as I saw how every year was pretty much a repetition of the last.

IG: What was the name of the department store?

KF: It’s gone now, but it was called Lansburgh's. The original building is now luxury rental apartments.

Then, I was casting about for a direction. When I was working at Lansburgh's it was the time where retailers were opening suburban malls. Lansburgh's was opening stores in multiple suburban malls, and they would send the younger management people out, because it was fairly grueling back then. You would have to be in an unheated space while they were still doing construction and painting and things like that. You would have to figure out these boxes and boxes of merchandise, and you would have to negotiate with the contractors about, “Can we get these racks, or these cases set?” because if you didn’t, then the construction workers would walk out with the merchandise.

In any case, I worked on two of these store openings with the same construction team. On the second one, one of the foremen said to me, “You are getting really good at this. You should be a foreman,” and I said, “Maybe I’ll be an architect,” and that is really how I decided to become an architect.

I worked for another year or two in retail, saved some money, and applied to architecture schools. Virginia Tech was in its second year of the new graduate program, so they weren’t overwhelmed with applications. It was quite inexpensive, and it was driving distance from Washington, which was where I had been living, so I went to Virginia Tech.

IG: Do you remember if you applied to any other schools?

KF: I think UVA [The University of Virginia], who rejected me. I think just those two.

IG: Both on the East Coast.

KF: Right. For one thing, I wanted to be able to maintain my friendships in DC, plus go back and get a summer job where I had plenty of contacts. Also, if you grow up in New York, you really do have that sense that really there is nothing worth thinking about west of the Hudson, until maybe you get to California. I remember my best friend from high school saying to me after I had been in Chicago for a long time, “Well, you seem to have made a real life for yourself there.” This was beyond her comprehension. No, I am not a native Chicagoan.

IG: You started at Virginia Tech in 1974.

KF: Yeah. I had been out of school four years at that point.

IG: You applied to get a master’s in architecture at Virginia Tech. Was it a two-year or a three-year program?

KF: It was a three-year program.

IG: And it was the second year that they were offering that program.

KF: Yeah, it was a brand-new program.

IG: Can you describe what the program and the school were like at that time?

KF: You probably have heard about Virginia Tech and its unique culture, but it was definitely the Ferrari era at Virginia Tech. Olivio Ferrari was highly influenced by the Bauhaus. He had studied with Max Bill at the Ulm School of Design in Germany, which was created in the tradition of the Bauhaus. The College of Architecture and Urban Studies tried to do this graduate program as just studio; not a lot of courses with specific content and tests and things like that. They really tried to do it in an integrated way, and they integrated it both academically and socially. Olivio and his wife [Lucy] used to have Friday night sherry parties very frequently and invite both faculty and graduate students. It was so different from the Jesuits of Georgetown, but it was a very warm and welcoming thing.

They loved experimentation. I do remember my first project. This is really funny. Think very Bauhaus, right? You were supposed to design a cube, I don’t know, 10, 11, 12 inches on the side. That cube was supposed to open and be friendly to the hand, okay? I had just come out of working in retail, and one of the things I did rather well was store display, picking things that should go on mannequins, and doing the props. I worked my last year or so in retail, actually in a very well-known furniture store in Georgetown, The Door Store, and I used to do the windows, arrange the floor, and things like that. For my project, I go to the art supply store, and I find this lovely plum-colored cardboard and some silver paper. I very delightedly and very carefully make a box. The edges were very cleanly cut, in this beautiful plum purple. Then I take the silver paper, and I make a two-sided loop and I stick it through a slot in the cover of the box and paste a perfectly round disk of silver paper to hold it in place. Here is this yummy, plum-colored box, with this silver loop enticing you to open it. God, I got creamed on that one. My redo was white with finger holes. That was my first architectural project.

IG: That would be a welcoming experience there. Were the rest of the students also from the East Coast?

KF: Let’s see. Who was there? In the program, there was a fellow from Argentina and one from Hungary. In my class there was one woman I’m still friendly with who was from Indiana, but it seems to me most people were from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

IG: You did another project that was called the Solar Townhouses. That was in 1976, while you were a student.

KF: Oh, yes. That period was the beginning of interest in understanding how to reduce energy consumption of buildings, because that was when there was that huge gas price increase. I was designing solar townhouses, and one of the things I struggled with was shadows. In an earlier project, I worked on shading devices trying to understand, “If I’m going to design a shading device, how well is it going to work? Because the sun is, as we all know, at different heights and different angles throughout the day and at different times of the year, relative to the building.” I spent a lot of time experimenting with that and being very unsure of how well the device would really work. I would build little models and take them outside, or light them by moving my Luxo lamp around to see.

During my first years at SOM, one of the young architects, Mitch Greene, asked the Computer Group to develop a program to calculate sun angles for different latitudes, dates, and times. This program was then integrated with 3D building models to show what would be in shadow at various times of the year. This technique was particularly effective in showing that the One Magnificent Mile Building would not cast undesirable shadows on Oak Street Beach during the summer. When I joined the Computer Group and volunteered to undertake the development of documentation and training manuals for the graphics software, I made sure there was an exercise that demonstrated how to produce accurate computer “Sun Studies,” as we called them. That was a very useful tool.

My interest in computers in architecture did not start with the solar townhouses, though. Most of the people I graduated with from Georgetown had a better idea of what they wanted to do when they graduated, and they had been hired into the insurance industry, the banking industry, or something like that. They were all being trained to use computers. I just said, “Hmm, that’s interesting. So professor, what is the future of computers in architecture?” I may as well have grown an extra head for saying that. They found a structural engineer who didn’t like women, to try to explain computers to me, and he used to bring his wife to our meetings, because he didn’t want to be alone with me. That didn’t work out so well, let’s just put that to the side. When I got to SOM and saw the nascent graphics capabilities, that’s when the potential of computers in architecture became very clear to me.

IG: Working with the structural engineer was something that Virginia Tech tailored to you because of your personal interest.

KF: Yeah.

IG: There was not a computer class.

KF: No.

IG: You identified that there was a future for computers in architecture, by seeing your peers from other industries.

KF: Right.

IG: That was very advanced.

KF: Well, it was 1974 or 1975.

IG: What type of information did this structural engineer convey?

KF: How to program in something called APL [named after the book A Programming Language by Kenneth E. Iverson].

IG: Was it to do structural engineering work?

KF: It wasn’t even that. It was just introduction to APL and the capabilities of APL. It was a mathematical language, maybe a slightly easier to use Fortran as I remember. It was good at doing matrix math, but I never really got very far with it.

IG: Was it supposed to give you credits in the school, or was it something complementary?

KF: As I said, they were doing this funny thing of, basically you were in studio, and maybe they would call this a project on the side. Then they would grade you, and they split up the grade among multiple topics, that is how I remember it. There was not a lot of emphasis on grading.

IG: Were there other students that shared the same interest in computers?

KF: There was one. He went to HOK. Actually, he first went to SOM, because they were desperate for people in the Computer Group and they said to me, “Do you know anybody else?” And I said, “Well, I think Nate just graduated,” and so they called Nate and hired him. He then went on and did HOK software.

IG: What was the name of this person?

KF: Nathan Huebner.

IG: Do you know if that computer class was incorporated into the teaching at Virginia Tech?

KF: No, they were quite slow in doing much with computers. But when Doug Stoker left SOM, he went to Virginia Tech for a year or so.

IG: Did you have any internships while you were doing your grad program at Virginia Tech?

KF: No. I needed to work for real money. When I was there and getting ready to graduate, there was a huge recession that was brought on by the gas prices and all of that. There was almost no architectural work on the East Coast. If you were going to get an internship, it was going to be unpaid, and I couldn’t afford to do that.

IG: You graduated in 1977. What were your options within the recession?

KF: There were firms in Houston and Chicago that were starting or had started to do work in the Middle East. They had been at it for a little bit, and that was really the work out there. And again, if you are from New York, the idea of going to the South…You didn’t do that. There was Chicago. Chris Scholl, the woman in my class who was from Indiana, had done an internship at SOM during her third year. She was about to leave Chicago and go back to Virginia Tech to finish at the time I was graduating. She was living in this shared house with a bunch of women, and I was able to stay with them while I looked for a job. I lived there for a few months after I moved to Chicago.

IG: Were there multiple offices that had work in Houston or Chicago?

KF: Well, SOM was one. SOM didn’t have a Houston office at that time. I think 3DI was doing some of that work. I can’t remember who else. Maybe Caudill Rowlett Scott in Houston. In Chicago, I think, maybe Perkins&Will. At C.F. Murphy, Helmut Jahn had just designed the library in Michigan City.

I came to Chicago, and I got a roll of nickels or dimes and the Yellow Pages. I sat in the phone booth at the Palmer House with my portfolio. Palmer House used to have very posh phone booths, let me tell you. I would just call and then somebody would say, “Well, we’ll talk to you. We are in Lincoln Park,” and I would go, “Where is that?” I was looking mostly for something in walking distance from the Palmer House phone booth.

I talked to a lot of people, but it was Jack Train who got me a job at SOM. I had known Jack Train from the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS). I don’t know if it was called that then. I was somewhat active in that at Virginia Tech, and there was an opening on an accreditation team for a student. The accreditation was for Clemson’s School of Architecture, so I went down and was part of that team. Jack Train was the head of that team. When I came to Chicago, I looked up Jack. George Jarik at SOM was trying to do this airport in Saudi Arabia and was desperate for young architects who would help with the civil engineering drafting. Jack made a call, and I went to talk to George. He went “Yeah, you can join,” so I got a job at SOM.

IG: What type of projects did you have in your portfolio, that might have been related to that type of work?

KF: Nothing. Well, I had done a small urban plan project with a tent structure for a thesis project.

IG: Was that the redevelopment options for the O Street market site?

KF: Yeah. The project was hardly Jeddah, but it did have a tent structure.

IG: I believe you went to the David Sharp Studio. Is that where you started?

KF: Maybe officially, but I was reporting to the head of Civil Engineering. The deal there was that if you were a recent architectural graduate and would agree to work as a civil engineering drafter, you would report to civil engineering for six months. After six months, they would move you to a regular studio.

At some point when I was staying with Chris Scholl and looking for a job, but before I had one, Chris said, “A bunch of people are going out to see this new Star Wars movie.” Larry Cuba and Tom DeFanti from UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) had done the 3D computer animation seen for the first time on film in Star Wars. As it turned out, the people who were going were all the people in the Computer Group from SOM, some of whom knew Cuba and DeFanti. Chris had done her internship in Walter Netsch’s studio, where she became friends with Steve Wierzbowski, who had been in the Computer Group and switched to Walter’s studio. I guess that is how she knew all these people.

After I met the whole Computer Group, I got the job on the Jeddah project. I went home and packed two suitcases, one full of sheets and towels and the other with my few presentable clothes, after putting myself through three years of graduate school. I headed to Chicago to stay at this huge rambling apartment in the 5800 block of North Kenmore, where I was living with six or eight other women. I show up at SOM and the firm had rented the whole floor in the 1 North Dearborn building. I think it was the top floor, from State to Dearborn, and they just filled it with flat drafting tables. One room was totally full, so I was the only person in the second vast room of drafting tables. They wanted me to trace contour maps, which I had never done before. I didn’t feel like I was doing it well or fast enough or whatever they wanted, but they were kind of unclear about their expectations. Suddenly, I see this woman who I had met at the Star Wars movie, and she had been telling me she was helping with the civil engineering computer applications. I said, “I’d be really interested to see what you are doing.” And she said, “Really? I really need help.” I drafted for, I don’t know, four days or something and started to do computer work.

IG: Were there any specific projects using the computer?

KF: This was Jeddah. It was actually a New York office project and most of the design was being done there. But New York did not have engineering capability, so they asked Chicago for help with civil and structures, plus there were one or two buildings designed in Chicago.

IG: Can you talk about that project?

KF: Well, let’s see. At the time, they were doing something called COGO, Coordinate Geometry, to have dimensional information about where roadways and buildings were and to do permit staking of new construction. Jeddah was partially existing; it wasn’t a greenfield site. They had to document this, and it was hard to document it because the Saudis would not permit an aerial survey. They had to work from old drawings or maps, and then somebody would go and say, “Oh wait, we have been assuming there was a building here. It apparently was never built. Or we were assuming this was open space, but no, there is a building here or there is a road here, or that is where the holding spot for the planes is.” I wasn’t privy to those meetings. For some reason, they used to do those late Sunday night.

The secretary who used to minute those meetings told me about them years later. The Chicago civil team had, I don’t know how many, 100 draftsmen? They were drawing various aspects of the site at various scales. There would be a meeting first thing Monday with a more experienced group of architects called technical coordinators. Each technical coordinator had a double-loaded row of drafters, five or six on each side, and he would start Monday morning and say to each drafter, “No, no, you have to change this. You have to change that.” He would work down the row and up the other side and that would be a week. Next week, do it again. Retail is fast. Fast and cheap is really important in retail. I was thinking, “Wow, this seems like a really bad process.” The people I was friendly with were in the Computer Group and I had been talking to them. COGO was not developed at SOM but it provided two dimensional coordinates of existing and proposed constructed elements on the site. This was very, very early in the development of computer graphics at SOM. They developed some ability to draw in 3D, but also to scale down what they drew and plot it out at a specific scale on a piece of paper. I asked, “We’ve got COGO and we’ve got this plotting capability. Couldn’t we bring them together so that we could take this COGO model of the site and cut out different parts of it and plot them at different scales?” These would be a very rough one-line drawings but very dimensionally accurate. The drafter could register them under their mylar drawings and see what had changed. There was some pushback: the programmers would say “The computer is not a Xerox machine, Kristine.”

IG: What was the pushback from? Was it leadership or the people who were working at the computer?

KF: It was the programmers who felt this wasn’t elevated/interesting enough for them to work on. Doug Stoker supported it, and he may have talked to the partners about it. In any case, they did it and it was successful for that purpose. This was in late 1977. Then they said, “We are moving you to an architectural studio because your six months are up.” This was just about the time when we were rolling out this capability. My civil engineering bosses got really angry about it and said, “Why did you ask for a transfer after this?” I said, “I didn’t ask. They just told me they were transferring me.” I didn’t want to rock any boats. Rich Mohr, who also stared working on civil computer application support, took over.

I ended up in the studio of Bob Holmes, who was later a partner in Denver. When I was introduced to the studio, the existing team made it very clear they didn’t want any women. But Bob would say, “Well, she knows the computers and Bruce [Graham] is big on the computers.”

IG: Can you explain what the Computer Group was?

KF: The Computer Group was a support team for the practice, rather like the specifications department. They created and facilitated the use of software running on in-house mini-computers (PDP 11/45 and 11/70) and also the transfer of electronic input data to out-of-house timeshare services that ran computationally intensive programs, such as finite element analysis, on mainframes. Doug Stoker was the boss, and he reported to Fazlur Khan. Diane Doty, later Diane Nelson, was the system manager and dealt with the hardware, repair technicians, and moving data on and off the system, either for transfer to/from outside computers or just because there wasn’t enough disk storage for everyone’s data. There was one team using the computer for accounting/financial reporting. I remember at least four people, but not their full names. Then there was a lot of support from Fazlur Khan for structural engineering applications. Doug Stoker was originally a structural engineer (although his degree was in architecture) assigned to the Sears Tower project. He had come up with a 3D graphics pre- and post-processor for finite element data. It allowed the structural engineers to visualize the structural elements and connectivity prior to submitting the data to a costly external analysis and also to visualize the structural deflections and levels of member stress in the returned analysis. Nick Weingarten was originally hired as a structural engineer but assigned to the Computer Group. Bill Kovacs had transferred to Chicago from the New York office, where he worked with that Computer Group, headed by Barry Milliken. They did a lot of database work related to building pro formas, space programming, etc. Bill had developed an earthwork calculation program for Jeddah that provided graphic feedback. I spent hundreds of hours running earthwork calculations for the Jeddah project. Nick and Bill were intent on developing 3D graphic capability and they were also interested in computer animation. Chuck Atwood was lead structural programmer. There was sometimes one more programmer, but no one who stayed for long. Then, there were these two young structural engineers, John Teng and John Harris, who were not officially part of the Computer Group but spent all their time there—days, nights, weekends. They were tasked with figuring out how to analyze very large tensile structures, specifically the Hajj Terminal roof at Jeddah. One pay period they had so many hours on their timesheets that accounting calculated the number of hours in a two-week period to see if the hours reported on their timesheets were possible. Right then SOM invented the technique for structural analysis of tensile structures. They had never been analyzed before. I didn’t really understand this until the Hajj Terminal got the AIA Twenty-five Year Award [in 2010]. John Zils was talking about it, and he said, “Up until then, the way you talked about tensile structures is the way you talked about bed sheets—by thread count.” The programmers would write project-specific software if a partner requested it or if anyone from a studio had an idea that seemed possible. One example was Mitch Green, who suggested sun angle visualization. I talked about that earlier.

There were all sorts of other things the Computer Group did. For example, they did elevator analyses. They had Otis’s software. Faz was very into it: “If a client wants a tall building, we can minimize the steel, we can minimize the number of elevators, and thereby reduce the cost significantly.” He was really a businessman in that regard, and we would run scenarios until we got good elevator performance with a minimum number. I did a lot of that, but it was later in the ’80s when I had joined the Computer Group. What I discussed here is who was in the Computer Group and how it operated when I first joined in mid-1977. Because of all the innovative work coming out of the Group, it got great support from the Chicago partners, particularly Fazlur Khan and Bruce Graham. It grew and changed very rapidly.

IG: Was Fazlur Kahn very involved with the Computer Group?

KF: The computer group reported to Faz.

IG: I see. Did they also report to Bruce Graham, or was it always through Faz?

KF: The actual reporting went through Faz. Doug was like a studio head, and each studio head reported to a specific partner. Bruce and Faz worked together on most projects, and in general, Faz would go along with what Bruce wanted. The Computer Group responded to requests from all the partners. For example, Walter Netsch was very interested in the ability to visualize his complex geometries. Bruce was the one who wanted to do the 3D animations and movies, and the Computer Group did those. That was a little later, but still very early. However, Bruce was not at all involved in the Jeddah project.

IG: Was the Computer Group based only in the Chicago office?

KF: There were separate non-coordinating computer groups in New York and San Francisco. Bill Kovacs, who was an important guy in the Computer Group and in the development of computer graphics, had started out in the New York office. There was a little more relationship and understanding of what was going on in New York. San Francisco was a challenge to bring into the fold.

IG: Can you describe the culture around that time in the studio at SOM? Did people hang out outside the studio and outside SOM? What was that time like in Chicago, and in the architectural world?

KF: Okay, a bunch of questions there. One is SOM supported heavy drinking and the rowdy interaction of design teams. The partners at that time had a staff bartender, all those things. But on Friday night, the bar at The Berghoff would be three deep with SOM people, and there would be lots of drinking and talking then. There was that. There was a big summer party that everybody was invited to. What else? I mean, there was a kind of sense of a team. The Computer Group was somewhat unique because we were almost entirely young single people. Plus, we were very interested in what we were doing. I wasn’t in the Computer Group then. The Computer Group and the computer-interested people used to hang out a lot socially. I spent a lot of time outside of work with those people. They were kind of my friends.

I was thinking about this, and I had never thought about it before, until I was thinking of talking to you. At that time, if you wanted to be another Bruce Graham, you would have to compete. Those people were immensely competitive and cutthroat and hid information from each other and delighted in people making fools of themselves if they didn’t have the right information and things like that. The Computer Group just had a very different perspective. It was quite cooperative and supportive. I think one of the reasons for our success is that we had this ethic that if you came to us with a computer problem and we agreed that we would help you do something with the computer, we would kill ourselves to make sure you were successful with that. We would jump through all sorts of hoops. I don’t think there was any other sort of interaction like that at SOM at the time. I think that is partially why it was successful.

In the early ’80s, SOM started opening new offices in places where the economy was emerging from the recession. When I started, I think it was already in New York, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Portland; that was it. Chicago was really doing a huge amount of work, and while I was there, we opened offices at least in Los Angeles, Denver, and Houston.

IG: Did the people that worked in the Computer Group always stay in the Computer Group, or did they transfer into any other studio at some point?

KF: There was some movement between the Computer Group and the studios. I mean, I came in as an architect, not a Computer Group person. I worked three years on the Makkah project as an architect before joining the Computer Group. Steve Wierzbowski is the person I mentioned who came into the Computer Group and then transferred to Walter Netsch’s studio and he didn’t go back to computers. There was some ability to move around. I don’t know of a lot of people other than those examples. I think there were a couple of people who were hired in as architects and got attracted to the computer work. But I am not aware of anybody who left the Computer Group to work in a studio otherwise.

IG: You started at SOM in 1977, and you were promoted to Supervisor for Graphic Production in the Computer Group in 1981.

KF: Right.

IG: You became an associate at SOM in 1982, correct?

KF: Right. I actually took a leave of absence for six months because I had worked on Jeddah and Makkah and had never seen the construction site. I was licensed and I worked for six months as the staff architect for the Historic Pullman Foundation on a little exterior update of their community houses and some work they were doing trying to renovate very dilapidated row houses.

IG: Was that independent from SOM?

KF: It was independent work. I took a leave of absence, and then I came back into the Computer Group. I think it was January ’81.

IG: The question that I had earlier was to know about what was going on in Chicago at the time, if you were aware of other initiatives, and how you participated in them, if you did.

KF: Oh, yes. Always a joiner. I joined the AIA as an associate member and attended a lot of their programs. Eventually, I don’t know who, maybe it was me, but we set up a computer committee. I chaired that for quite a while. I was active in AIA, including organizing conferences. The Graham Foundation used to have programs regularly with cocktails after work. I used to go to those. Then we started publishing articles about our computer work. A lot of architects from all over the world used to come to the Computer Group to see how computers could be used in architecture. We had people from South Africa, Finland, China, and really all over. I’m talking early ’80s. One of the people who came was an interesting architect from Canada, George Banz. I had used one of his books, Elements of Urban Form, at Virginia Tech in an urban design elective. He showed up at SOM and he invited me to speak at a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) conference. The RAIC was having a special conference on computers and the two keynote speakers were me and Douglas Cardinal. As far as I could tell, Douglas Cardinal was ahead of us all, because he was using some HP mechanical software to define the curves of his buildings and stake them out in the field, and I was pretty impressed by that.

IG: How would people around the world know about the Computer Group? Was it through the publishing that you were doing?

KF: It was the partnership, or at least the Chicago partnership, that saw the computer capability as a great differentiator. They were producing marketing publications highlighting our computer capability that showed the models of the Hajj Tent and the Jeddah airport, deflected shape diagrams from finite element analysis, and some 3D massing. Also, a 3D mass model of the clustering of the two Makkah campuses as well as the proposed faculty houses. Somebody else in the Computer Group did those Makkah computer models because I was working on the production of a full-color book documenting the Makkah Master Plan, in both Arabic and English, by hand-cutting Rubylith overlays for the color printing. They would publish these images and, as they were working all over the world, they would hand out these very handsome brochures to potential clients. They promoted it.

IG: It was an internal promotion, whether it was publications or conferences, but it was the SOM partnership sharing that as a valuable part of the work. Very interesting.

KF: Well, because it was very unique. There was pretty much nobody else who could do what we could.

IG: I can’t imagine there were other offices that had that capacity.

KF: There were some big, mostly mechanical CAD systems on the market, like CATIA. There was one called Auto-trol, which I did a lot of work with subsequently, that was more architecturally oriented. Intergraph was out there. There were a handful of big expensive products typically running on mainframes.

IG: Because you were either the only one or one in a handful of offices that had that capacity, I am assuming that there was a close relationship with the companies who were developing either the computers, like IBM, or the software.

KF: First of all, we were developing all the software ourselves. And second, I don’t think any of the hardware people were interested in marketing to architectural firms. The hardware was just too expensive; they were only talking to government agencies and major corporations. As mini-computers and then Unix workstations came on the market, that began to change. Before the advent of the PC, there were “turnkey” vendors, who would write computer drafting programs and assemble the hardware—mini-computers, digitizing tablets, graphic terminals, and plotters—to create a system where things worked together. Some of these systems allowed their graphic terminals to connect to distant timeshare computers. Today, we assume computer hardware and software components will work together. Back then, it took a huge effort. If we had wanted to talk to Auto-trol they would have been very happy to talk to us. If we wanted talk to Intergraph, they would be very happy to talk to us. But SOM didn’t want that. Our partners liked the idea of having our own software with unique capabilities that no one else had. We were buying DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) computers, we were buying Tektronics terminals, and we were buying plotters. Our programmers were writing drivers and interfaces for all this hardware, as well as our graphics software. We had some CalComp plotters, but then we went to the Xynetics plotters, which were really quite remarkable.

We had all sorts of strange and, in retrospect, very humorous problems, particularly with the Xynetics plotter. At the time, plotters drew by moving Rapidograph pens across paper or mylar. This was SOM, which prided itself on the quality of its drawings. Although we had used the CalComp plotter for the Jeddah civil underlays, the CalComp couldn’t use a 6 aught Rapidograph, and it used rolls of either paper or mylar, but not pre-printed title sheets. The Xynetics could plot on a flat bed, could use preprinted title sheets, and could use very fine Rapidographs. So, obviously, we had to get the Xynetics. I think this was a $80,000 piece of hardware, and this is in 1970s dollars. Then, it needed a perfectly climate-controlled room, which was about another $40,000. But once you paid all of that, you got the plotter with a Xynetics technician for as long as you needed that technician to get the plotter up and running. Unfortunately, that technician could not get the Xynetics to work with our system and software. Everybody was using Xynetics plotters offline. In other words, you brought a tape, you loaded it, and then the tape had kind of CNC instructions that drove the plotter. Everything we did was online: when you were ready to plot, you executed the “Plot” command, and the software formatted the data and fed it directly to the plotter. With the Xynetics, that just wasn’t working. And it wasn’t working. Fazlur Khan had convinced the Makkah client to pay for all this, so that their project would be using the most advanced technology in the world. The clients were coming to look at their plotter, so it was a very tense debugging period. The Xynetics had a drawer at the bottom, about two-feet wide, that held all the electronics. The rest of it was just a cabinet. One day, the technician came into the room and the drawer was open, and he tripped over it, and we all go, “Oh my God.” But the plotter started working!

The other challenge was that we had committed to doing working drawings on the computer for the Makkah project, something we had never done before. Nick Weingarten and I spent a lot of time adding drafting capabilities to the 3D modeling software. I would go to the most experienced drafters and ask them, “When you do a dimension line and you have your witness line, how far does the dimension line extend behind the witness line?”

IG: You were trying to translate hand drafting into the computer. That’s interesting.

KF: Fortunately, we did that successfully. I would talk with studio members about the requirements for this new software version; Nick would go home and code it at night; and we would come back and test it the next morning. I remember once executing the “Hidden Line” command and what it gave me was this sort of inside out picture where all the hidden lines were displayed, and all the other lines were hidden. This was real-time programming, as it were.

IG: Strange things happen.

KF: As far as I know, the tight relationship with hardware partners really did not happen until the IBM deal, which was a little bit after I left.

IG: You worked there until 1984.

KF: Right.

IG: What was your decision to leave and where did you want to go after that?

KF: I was recruited by a firm that is now called Epstein. At the time, they had absolutely no computer capability. They were looking for someone to get them into computers, and they were basically working down the hierarchy in the Computer Group, seeing who they could hire away. I know they tried to recruit Nick Weingarten, who wasn’t interested. I looked at what I was doing at SOM, and I would always be at least third fiddle there. Although I loved it and I loved what I was doing and all of that, this was a real opportunity to take a firm into the computer age the way I thought it should be done. So I accepted the job. I was very sad to leave, but I accepted the job.

IG: It sounds like it was a great opportunity to start a Computer Group in a place that had no computer presence. Were you able to recruit people from Epstein or did you bring people from outside? What were the resources that you were given to start the group?

KF: Let’s see. Not much. It was me. First of all, I had to define requirements and select a system. One of the things I realized when I got to Epstein is that, at the time, SOM did some of these massive urban scale projects, and then they did high-rises, and occasionally another building type. Epstein did process engineering and material handling engineering. They had general architecture, interiors, and construction. They had five or six subsidiary companies doing all these different types of engineering and buildings, and they had overseas offices. I was supposed to find a computer system that would work for everyone. There was a committee with delegates from each subsidiary, but I was working alone until we got the system. Then, I think I got a secretary and a plotter operator. As we started to do project support and things like that, I was able to hire some people. I always liked hiring out-of-field people, because people who had worked out-of-field previously were more agile problem-solvers.

I had an interesting group of people coming out of industrial design programs and some architecture programs. By then, computer graphics had taken off a little and interested students were getting exposure in college. I think I hired one person from another firm. I did hire some database programmers because we did a lot of work with databases. It was a fairly small contingent.

IG: You said earlier in our conversation that, at SOM, Fazlur Khan was very involved. Was there a similar role at Epstein?

KF: Not really. I was responsible for “vision.” There were certainly many executives who saw the marketing potential, though.

At one point, Hewlett-Packard (we were using Hewlett-Packard hardware) asked me to be at one of the big trade shows to show how we were using their hardware and the Auto-trol software. We didn’t develop it, but we had customized it in a way that it did pretty fabulous stuff that nobody else was doing with Auto-trol at the time. It really had to do with exploiting the hardware networking and distributed storage capabilities to allow the different disciplines to see other’s plans as underlays, so they could see changes immediately and avoid interferences. Arleen Boyd, who was HP’s worldwide workstation marketing executive, issued the invitation. We were talking and she said, “Thank you for doing this.” I said, “Thank you for inviting me. No one else ever expressed this much interest in what we were doing.” She said, “I’ve watched it. All these guys are out there looking over your shoulder trying to figure out who is making all these decisions and figuring out what to do. I realized right away it was you.”

IG: Were you always identified by other women?

KF: I was very active in Chicago Women in Architecture. Perhaps I didn’t mention that. That was certainly a strong affiliation. The programmers at the Computer Group at SOM were pretty much all men. There were exceptions, but pretty much all men. But then, the people who actually worked as the liaisons to the studios evolved into being mostly women. We used to always joke because we were all very short. In fact, I think I was the tallest, at 5’2”. We used to call ourselves SWICs: Short Women in Computing. I think the fact that it was mostly women in that role had to do with all the guys wanting to be Bruce Graham: that didn’t really seem to be an option for us. We were all looking for some place where we would be respected, where our work would be valued, where we would have a sense of community and support in our work. We found it in the Computer Group. That is my assumption. That is the way I felt anyway.

IG: Was that a similar situation at Epstein?

KF: It has evolved a lot but, at that time, Epstein was much more an engineering firm. They primarily did industrial facilities. They had one designer that if somebody came and said, “Can you do a high-rise?” they would bring Shelley Schlegman out. Shelley was a good designer. Nothing against Shelley, but he didn’t get to do a lot of interesting work. Where were we going with that conversation? Women. One of the things it seems to me is that in that time, women liked working for men in the Computer Group at SOM, but they didn’t really like working for another woman. I never quite got it, but it seemed to be the case. I had a lot of problems attracting and keeping female employees. I mean, it’s not that I didn’t try to hire women, but I had a lot of problems with it.

IG: You joined Epstein in 1984 and you opened the Computer Technology Management (CTMI) subsidiary in 1986.

KF: Was it that soon? Wow. You are right, it was.

IG: Yeah, only two years after joining the firm you started the consulting subsidiary.

KF: Right.

IG: Tell us a little bit about that.

KF: That was a very awkward thing because I had no or very little client-facing experience or marketing experience at the time. I remember having terrible stomach aches for months when they told me they wanted me to do this. We had done well in making projects that had been brought in and managed by other people look good using the technology and people continued to expect us to do that, but then they got mad that we weren’t bringing in all sorts of outside revenue. So that was a difficult thing.

I did develop a couple of significant clients, but probably the most interesting one was the Sears store planning and construction group who, when I first started working with them, were still in the Sears Tower. Of course, SOM had done their building. They were using the Auto-trol system, and we were very expert at the Auto-trol system. In the Sears Tower, they had all the computer operators in a single room and this CAD group supported all stores and merchandising departments. If they started to work on a new merchandise layout for a store, they would go get the tape for that store, they would load it, and somebody would do whatever needed to be done to update the layouts, for that store. Then, they would save it, plot it, and put the tape back.

They were moving to Hoffman Estates, which was very spread out, and management wanted to move store planning personnel into each merchandising department. They wanted them to be distributed. Well, under those circumstances, you are not going to walk a mile through this huge office to find a tape. We worked closely with IBM, who were their hardware and software people, on a version of something we had done at Epstein, which allowed you to check in and out specific CAD files, maintain multiple versions, and things like that. As I recall, we ended up with a custom build of the OS/2 operating system for that, and that was really [Kristine Fallon Associates, Inc.] KFA’s first project.

IG: Sears was also a client when you were at Epstein, correct?

KF: Right. When there was a recession in 1992–3, they decided to discontinue CTMI as a separate subsidiary and fold it back into operations. I became VP-CIO at that point. But then they said, “We are just not going to try to do competitive computer work anymore. We just need some people to make sure things don’t break and goodbye.” That was right when Sears was ready to start this big project, I mean, exactly at that time. I said, “That’s too bad, but if you are not going to continue to pursue outside computer projects, do you mind if I do?” I didn’t want to be accused of stealing a client. They said, “Oh, no.” It was the same week that I went out to Sears and they said, "Okay, Kristine. We want to start this now.” I said, “There is one small wrinkle here. As of Friday, I’m no longer with Epstein.” They said, “To our group, you have always been Epstein, so we don’t care.” That was the beginning of KFA.

IG: You opened Kristine Fallon Associates, Inc. on April 28, 1993. Were you on your own at that point?

KF: I was very on my own. I had Sears and there was another small client, a client for whom we updated their facility plans. It was Bellcore Technology, who isn’t around anymore. They also wanted to continue working with me, so that was good. I had basically two clients that Epstein didn’t want to deal with anymore when I started at KFA.

At that time, I was a contributing editor to Architectural Record on technology topics. On big federally funded transportation projects, there is always a project management oversight contractor, which is somebody who is supposed to just keep an eye on what everyone is doing. They make sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing, make sure they are not really wasting tons of money, and that kind of thing. There was a program management team for the LA Metro Rail project, and they were looking for a CAD expert because they were making a transition on that project from hand drafting to CAD. They didn’t have the expertise in-house to say whether that was going well or not. They hired me to come out once a quarter to stay a week and write a report on what was going on with computers there. Those were my three early projects, and those were pretty good projects. My thought then was that I didn’t want to be a woman-owned firm. I just wanted to work on interesting projects. I love big projects. This was all pretty good.

IG: These are large projects. Can you give us a sense of how long would these projects last? Let’s take the project for Sears as an example.

KF: That was probably a year or so. The LA Metro Rail project, of course, went on forever. At some point, I think I had been doing it for two or three years, and I started teaching at UIC. That started to get in the way of just disappearing for a week to the West Coast. I think they found somebody else or decided they knew enough now that they could do it in-house.

IG: You were teaching technology at UIC.

KF: Right. Yeah. UIC had a problem. This is hearsay, but that they almost lost accreditation and one of the issues was they were not equipping young architects with any computer literacy, so they hired me to fix that. I taught required undergraduate, and I believe the graduate course was also required in computer applications.

IG: You were asked to teach computers in architecture at UIC in 1994. I’m curious about introducing students to the computers. For example, at Virginia Tech, there hadn’t been a computer when you were there. Were there students more attuned to computers at UIC or particular people at UIC that really benefited from the experience of working with the computer?

KF: Do you mean did some of my students do well after they got in?

IG: Yeah. What was the response to the courses on computer and technology at UIC? Was it a popular class? Was it part of the larger curriculum? Was it something that felt separate?

KF: I think the way existing faculty saw it was, “Just teach them how to draw a floor plan with AutoCAD.” The way I saw it was, “Let’s explore what computers are going to mean in architecture because you are starting a 50-year career here, kid.” There was a little conflict with that. I think we finally decided I could do more innovative stuff with the undergraduates. With the graduate students, I had to teach them how to use AutoCAD.

IG: I have to check the dates, but I am thinking that people like Doug Garofalo would have been there then.

KF: He was around. There was also Ben Nicholson. We had a graduate student in common, who did some really impressive computer graphics work that he submitted to both Ben’s class and mine. He ended up working for Revit. I don’t know what happened to him. There was another guy who liked working with me and I started working with him while he was an undergraduate in school. When he graduated, he joined me full time. He is still there. He is the vice president.

IG: That would be Peter Urban.

KF: Yeah.

IG: You introduced BIM products to the students.

KF: Right. Or tried to. There were two products. One—Nemetschek—is now very big in Europe and owns Graphisoft. It didn’t at the time. They had another product called Allplan, which was quite a nice product. I tried to get the students to use that, and it was definitely a BIM product. Nemetschek sponsored a summer research program at UIC that hired students to try to model and do drawings of the same project with different CAD. They hired me to run that program for them.

The person who was introducing me to these European CAD vendors was Arlene Boyd from Hewlett-Packard. Everybody was going to PC-based CAD, and HP was selling the more powerful but more expensive engineering workstations: UNIX workstations. She was trying to create a market for the workstations by encouraging people to use this heavier BIM software. She introduced me to another German vendor, Speedikon. They are still around but I don’t think they market in the US. I did some consulting work with them. I spoke a lot at conferences. Back then, that was a big deal. There were conferences called AEC Systems and 20,000 people would come. If you were a speaker at AEC Systems talking about the next generation of CAD or how to run a successful CAD operation, people paid attention and called.

IG: I believe in ’95, you started to work with Autodesk. It was a series to sell into vertical markets for Autodesk, the Autodesk resellers.

KF: That’s right.

IG: A lot of people were transferring from UNIX-based CAD to AutoCAD. Can you talk about that relationship and that work with them?

KF: I worked with Lynn Allen very closely and we were doing reseller training on pitching to different markets. Up until then, AutoCAD had just been a general drawing tool. I was explaining what architects wanted from AutoCAD. What facility managers were looking for. I think I did process engineering, too. I don’t know if they had people doing the mechanical markets, but I assume so. I’m a little vague on this, but I think it was a two-day curriculum, lots of PowerPoint. Some of the training we did was in San Rafael, where Autodesk was headquartered then. A lot of the training we did at regional offices. Lynn and I would fly in, do two days of training, and fly out.

IG: Were you still the only employee at your company or had you hired more people by then?

KF: At that point, I think Peter was working for me, at least part-time. Also, V. Arunthavanathan (Arun) had joined by then. He was a wonderful, brilliant guy, originally from Sri Lanka, and he was very, very good at AutoCAD. He was a brilliant programmer and knew how to customize AutoCAD and database software, to do pretty much anything you wanted. Around that time, many organizations who were using Auto-trol and other CAD systems of that generation wanted to switch to PCs and AutoCAD. Sears was one of them. There were several different projects we did for them, but at the point when they were switching to AutoCAD, I think that was the second project. I think the first project was setting up a CAD file management system for Auto-trol. Then, we helped them translate all their Auto-trol data to AutoCAD; we redid the CAD file management system to work with AutoCAD. That is when we needed the custom build of OS/2, which was done by IBM.

In any case, Arun was working for Sears’s AutoCAD reseller at the time, and then, I think, they went belly up. He came to work for me, and he was absolutely wonderful. In the early 2000s, he had a heart attack and died, which was a huge blow because he was my key technical resource at that time. Basically, it was Peter, Arun, and me.

IG: Where were your offices located then?

KF: For the first couple of years, I sub-let a single office where I could fit two desks from a law firm at the old Dearborn Station, which is very near where I live. For a long time, I think about fifteen years, we rented at 30 East Adams, which was mostly warehouse space at the time. We started to get big clients who wanted to come and meet with us, and the image wasn’t right. We moved to 11 East Adams in 2011, and that is where the firm was until the pandemic.

IG: Were you contacted by other architecture and design firms to aid them with computers?

KF: This was the next thing. I had never really wanted to do that; I was setting myself up to do special technology projects and consulting. “You want to do something special with CAD, you have a particular CAD problem, I’ll help you.” And I did. I was well known in the architectural community because of the computer committee and the conferences I spoke at. Also, my articles in Architectural Record. I was known because if you started at SOM, there was a whole network of people who knew who you were and how good you were. But one of the design firms that I had helped with a computer strategy asked me to provide computer/CAD support services and convinced me many smaller firms would be interested. I started to provide support services to them, and I started to advertise. At that time, AIA Chicago had a little newsletter that went out monthly I think, and we put a little ad in there. We had architects calling us for help.

We did that for a number of years, but when we started to do the very big transportation projects, it was incompatible. Architects are dreadful clients. They are very fussy, and they want lots of personal attention. I would be sitting there thinking, “Do I really want to spend time with a design firm disputing a $50 support charge when I am working on implementation of a web-based project collaboration system for a multi-billion-dollar design/construction program?” It was really difficult. As we added staff, everyone wanted to work on the big projects, not the support services. We gave design firm clients nine to twelve months’ notice that we weren’t going to be providing support services anymore. And we stopped doing it, but we did do it for quite a while.

IG: What type of architects were looking for those services? Do you remember who you worked with at that point?

KF: We must have worked for twenty or thirty Chicago-area firms. One was DeStefano + Partners.

IG: Did you work with Jim DeStefano when you were at SOM?

KF: I knew Jim DeStefano from SOM. We did work for DeStefano. We did quite a bit of work for Hammond, Beeby and Babka and for Hancock & Hancock. We did work for Lohan. We did work for SCB—mostly specific projects. SCB had their own computer group. We did work for Loebl Schlossman & Hackl, for Stanley Tigerman, for Environ, for Landahl Design Studios. We worked with many smaller firms too.

IG: That was the moment that a lot of the architecture offices were integrating their process with computers.

KF: Right.

IG: You published the book The AEC Technology Survival Guide in 1997, and you were invited by the government of Singapore to talk about it. Tell us about the book and its significance in your career at that time.

KF: Wiley [the publishing company] approached me and asked me to write this book. Ken Sanders had done a book a little bit before mine that was about what you can do with this software and what you can do with that software. Mine was more focused on integrating computer technology into business and practice and what the impact should be. The government of Singapore was trying to implement BIM very early on. Obviously, there were lots of technical and process issues. Another AEC technology pundit I know, Brad Holtz, brought my book to their attention, and they thought, “This is perfect. This is exactly what we are looking for. Can she come and speak at our Bau-IT Conference? We’ll buy 250 copies of the book.” That was really exciting practically and Wiley was happy about that. The Singapore government gave copies to the Singapore architects attending the conference. Every design firm in Singapore, I think, has a copy of that book. But it did not sell well in the US. I don’t think architects here were really interested in business process re-engineering. The book really had to do with streamlining work processes. That was really that first insight on the Jeddah project. Communication in design and construction was a really funky process and it could be vastly improved. For some reason, that has always been my mindset, and that is what this book was about. Then, getting into the 2000s, the work on the very large capital programs has been all about that.

IG: At this point in the late 1990s, there was interest from architects to bring computer into their practices, but there was also the work of managing information for large companies, unrelated to architecture. In a way, you are coming from an architecture perspective, but you are understanding the capacity of the computer beyond drafting.

KF: There was a lot of pushback at the middle management level, because the people who are, whatever you call them, technical coordinators or studio heads or project managers, were people with twenty years of experience and they were used to walking into a drafting room and looking over people’s shoulders and being able to tell if the team was going to meet the deadline or not. Suddenly, it was like a black box. I mean, they couldn’t see anything until they plotted it, and plotting was a cumbersome and expensive thing at that point. Most people didn’t buy their own plotters. They used plotting services from the repro houses. But when you were iterating like crazy, it was very, very difficult. When we got to Revit, that whole CAD for Principals study was an attempt to talk about what the leaders of design firms wished that CAD would do for them, rather than just be able to draw faster.

IG: This was a project that you were approached about in ’99, by what was called Charles River Software. They wanted to get input from design principles and reshape the technical capabilities of CAD. Have you continued to work with what then turned into Revit?

KF: Arleen Boyd was the person who brought me into the Charles River Software consulting. She had left HP and was consulting. We worked with them quite a bit, and then they got bought by Autodesk. My firm did a lot of consulting to Revit users. We did not do any further consulting with Revit or Autodesk. Autodesk got very mad at me when I told them that I was starting to work with Revit.

IG: Did you ever have any clauses that prevented you from working with any company?

KF: No. I would never have accepted them. I don’t recall anybody trying.

After that, I don’t think I had any consulting assignments for a little bit. In the ’90s, we did a lot of system conversions for people who were using Auto-trol to AutoCAD. This is where Arun was really, really incredible in the early days of KFA. One of our clients was the National Gallery of Art. They had AES, a SOM/IBM system. Nobody understood that system. I didn’t entirely because I had never worked with the IBM product, but it was close enough to what we were doing when I was there that we were able to sort it out and give them a very, very complete transition.

IG: This is migrating from an existing AES system and Oracle database to AutoCAD and MS Access?

KF: Right.

IG: Migrating everything without any loss of information. You also worked with manufacturer Cutler-Hammer at that time.

KF: Right. Doing the same thing.

IG: That would be 1998. And in 2000 you have one of the big projects, which was the work for the CTA [Chicago Transit Authority]. You had already worked on the Los Angeles Metro Rail Project in ’93, but this was a comprehensive project. Can you talk about the CTA project?

KF: I have never been a great marketer, but a woman who did a lot in the transportation agency, Joby Berman, figured out that this kind of technology role on a program management team, or program management oversight team, was really something that I would be good at. By then I had a track record because I had a good reference from the team I worked for at LA Metro Rail. I talked to Joby Berman, who did a lot of work in transportation and had had an engineering firm. I think she had just sold it to TYLin. She provided introductions to a lot of the big project management/construction management organizations, where I didn’t have a network like I did with design firms. I pressed my capabilities and at one of the firms—O’Brien Kreitzberg, soon acquired by URS—there was a senior person I knew from when I worked at the Historic Pullman Foundation. They were going after the program management contract for the $1.6 billion CTA program. That year, the AEC Systems conference was in Chicago, and I had done a presentation. It was not based on any project work, but just on the technology of these new web-based project collaboration systems and what a benefit they would be for large projects, et cetera. Jack Hartman, who at the time was EVP at CTA, came to that lecture and somehow expressed an interest in this technology to somebody. URS figured out the connection, and I had previously been in to explain KFA’s capabilities and interest, so they asked me to be on their team. And we won. So that is how KFA started working with the web-based project management technology.

The good thing about having worked at SOM is that scale doesn’t daunt you. You understand it. You understand that you can’t do a billion-dollar project the same way you do a house. You really do understand that. We selected and implemented the system for CTA and it was immensely successful. This was very funny: it was the first time a major public agency had done such a thing. Jack Hartman, when he heard me speak, thought this was a tried-and-true thing. He was totally shocked to learn he was the first public servant to do this. Fortunately, it worked out very well for everyone, and we continued to work for the CTA for about seventeen years following that.

That is when the business of KFA took a big step-up because we then got a big, similar job with the Illinois Tollway (Jack Hartman had moved there from the CTA), and we started to get called in all over the country. That really changed our business. Before, we were doing much smaller, shorter-term projects. Even with Sears, we had worked for them for many years, but it was probably two, three, four sub-projects, for each of which I had to negotiate the fee and all of that. Now we were getting these five-year contracts, where we would have one or more people involved full-time. That is a much easier business model to manage than constantly hopping from project to project and trying to keep everyone busy.

IG: Did that force you to grow the office?

KF: Oh, gosh, yeah. The person who owns KFA now, Gregory Bush, had worked in the dot-com industry. Remember there was a big dot-com bubble burst in 2000? Well, he got caught in that. He was out of work; he had a family and children, and another child on the way. His uncle’s wife was working as a secretary on the CTA program, and she was working for the program manager. She was privy to the fact that everyone was going, “I hope Kristine can find enough people.” She told Greg, “Kristine is looking for people.”

At the time, we were in this one room office at 30 East Adams, and all of a sudden, this guy bursts in the door and he goes, “Where is Kristine Fallon? I am looking for a job.” He was so forceful, plus he had credentials. I said, “Shit, this is a no-brainer. I mean, this guy is great. He’ll get things done.” He came to work, and went to work at CTA and did a great job, and he was the lead on the Tollway program. He is the one, with that forcefulness, when I was asking key employees, “Do you want to get together as a management team and buy me out?” Greg came to me and he said, “Well, the other guys may not want to, but would you let me buy the company?”

IG: I’d like to know more about the project for the CTA, how you collaborated with the team, and the relationship with the client.

KF: Because we were always doing something that people didn’t understand very well, we tended to work fairly independently. Usually, we had an immediate middle manager we reported to. Typically, the program manager, or whoever the head of things was, was pretty interested because they didn’t entirely understand it, and there was some risk there certainly, and they had to keep an eye on it. Under those circumstances, we really weren’t supposed to approach the client directly, but sometimes the client did approach us. Sometimes, if there was a kerfuffle, then suddenly it was, “You go see Jack and explain to him, I’m not going to do it.” We would typically be a little self-contained group. It was usually all our people working together on the system implementation and support.

IG: You then continued to work for the CTA. For example, you worked for the Blue Line, which was a web-based project collaboration and management system. That focused on the implementation of a specific line.

KF: That particular one dealt primarily with access to information and tracking due dates. Those were the two things we were really focusing on. On large projects, suddenly something goes wrong, and the CTA engineers get a call and they are going, “Where are the drawings?” Well, if it’s after hours or somebody’s out, they can’t find them. The ability to get a hold of the drawings, get hold of the documentation. “We did that because they told us to.” “Where did they tell us to do that?” “Is that really what they told you to do?” You need to get all that documentation well organized in a way you can put your hand on it really quickly. Because it was internet-based, you could access it from anywhere. You could do it from your PC at home if you are called in the middle of the night or something. That was very desirable.

IG: By this point, the presence of the computer is much more widespread, even in architecture offices. There is already a need to think about the challenge to preserve and archive this information. I believe that at that point, I think it was 2002, the Art Institute of Chicago was interested in thinking about that challenge and what it would take to archive digital information. Can you talk about your involvement in that effort?

KF: The person who thought this was important and was willing to fund the research project was Harold Schiff who had been with Schal Construction. The curatorial department of architecture at that time—John Zukowsky was leading it—had an advisory committee, which included Nick Weingarten, whom I had worked with at SOM, and on the software for the Makkah project even before I was in the Computer Group. They had interviewed some candidates with archiving backgrounds. Nick was saying, “By the time these guys understand what the problem is, the funding will be spent. I think I know someone who could do this.” They called me and I undertook the project.

IG: What was the scope of the project?

KF: How can we collect, preserve, and use digital design data. The Art Institute has the second largest, at the time anyway, the second-largest archive of architectural drawings in the United States. During our first meeting we had a walk through to see what was there, what they do with them, how they take care of them, and things like that. There had been a long period where somebody would sketch something, and somebody would CAD it. That was a workflow that was understood. But now, and particularly in the early presentations and conceptualization, some people were working directly with the computer, and this created some challenges. I remember saying to John when we were walking through the archive, “I’m very excited to be starting this project. Of course, in the beginning, there’s always that little frisson that you are not sure you are going to be able to solve the problem. Right?” He laughed at me. I think we did a good job on that. That is still a cornerstone of all conversation about archiving digital design data by architects. It was a very important piece of work.

IG: Did you work directly with John Zukowsky or were there other curatorial members involved?

KF: Actually, John was on his way to retirement, and I can’t quite remember when he left. Martha Thorne was the contact for the project, and I worked very closely with Martha on that.

IG: What was the outcome of the project?

KF: There were a few things. The process we went through was significant. I forget how many design firms we interviewed about how they used digital design tools. There were quite a few: Valerio Dewalt Train, Ross Barney + Jankowski, OWP/P, Beck, SOM, Murphy/Jahn, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, IDEO. I think at least eight firms that we talked to, and we diagrammed the process. Did I send you a copy of the report?

IG: I don’t have the report.

KF: I probably have a digital copy of that, which is probably hard to move around because it’s big. But I can let you know.

We also had an advisory committee. Bill Mitchell was on the advisory committee. Some people from hardware and software firms were on the advisory committee. Some architects were too. Doug Garofalo was, Joe Valerio was. It was a big study, and these advisory committee meetings were where we demonstrated progress.

Every time I went in to talk to one of the case study firms, what they showed me was a PowerPoint presentation. This was really their usual way of documenting, “This is where we were at 30%, 60%, end of DD, etc… I realized that these firms were not going back to their original CAD files to show a project. Maybe we didn’t need to get all buried in the messiness of different CAD data formats, maybe we could just use something like PDF?” Adobe got very interested in what I was doing, and I got some good input from Adobe.

You can encapsulate pretty much anything in a PDF file, and you could even embed videos. That was the hardest point. In fact, we reissued the document after the big publication. I’m not sure I have that version anywhere, to change the video guidance. That was the one that was tricky. But you do a PDF and you just put simple animation in it. I can open that study now—The Art Institute decided to publish it electronically in PDF—and see pretty much everything, and we are out more than twenty years.

The idea that evolved was a two-tier collection where you have these extracted PDF artifacts, and then you have a repository of the original data, hopefully described reasonably. We worked on metadata for that. In the computer industry, there still are these repositories that track formats, and then have some ability to automate updating formats when there are changes. This was a very long, complicated study, and I am sort of explaining it in ten minutes. But it was very good, and we took it to a number of worldwide events, particularly the International Confederation of Architectural Museums meeting in Venice that was scheduled to coincide with the Biennale. That would have been in 2004.

IG: Was the goal, when it was supported by Harold Schiff, to make that report available to other institutions?

KF: Yes. For a long time, The Art Institute’s Department of Architecture had it on their website, and anybody could go out and read it, copy pieces of it, and things like that. We also made a bunch of CDs that we handed out.

IG: While it was initiated by the Art Institute, it was really meant to be a resource for all the institutions.

KF: Right, it was.

IG: Do you know if many of those institutions implemented it in some capacity?

KF: The Art Institute went further and did a pilot study of doing this, which we spoke about at a 2007 conference in Paris. They implemented the repository, and in fact, they put it in open source, but then The Art Institute wanted to build the new Renzo Piano wing, and they wanted Harold’s money for that, so they convinced him not to take the digital archiving work any further, and they dropped it.

However, a lot of organizations, internationally as well as nationally, have initiated some efforts, and most of them have used this as a reference to some extent. For example, Bill Mitchell was very big on DSpace because they either developed it or were using it at MIT, but there was a different repository that became the standard. But the idea of a repository remained constant.

IG: The project that you did for the CTA won a lot of recognition, both for the CTA and for you. That would have been in the early 2000s. At that point you also started teaching again at Northwestern University.

KF: That’s right. They asked me to come do a guest lecture, and then they asked me to do a half course on technology topics, my choice, and that evolved. It was very different from year to year, but I did it for about ten years. Toward the end, they made it a required course, which was not as much fun because then there were people in it who really weren’t very interested, but it was fun before it was a required course.

IG: You taught from 2006 until 2016. It was interesting that it was more in project management.

KF: That was in the Master’s of Construction Management program.

IG: In the School of Engineering.

KF: Yeah.

IG: Did you ever get asked from any of the other architecture schools to teach computers after you taught it at UIC?

KF: No, I don’t think so.

IG: What was the next project that was significant for KFA?

KF: I think at some point we started to also do some financials and things like that as part of the web-based project management. But the other part was BIM: Revit, CAD for Principals after it, and the CAD for Principals Software Evaluation Report, all of that was significant.

IG: You did all the BIM work for Walsh Construction, even the General Services Administration (GSA).

KF: That was a huge procurement. They went out with an RFP for BIM consultants and everybody and his uncle participated, and we were one of the winners. We beat out SOM. We did. That was an important contract. Unfortunately, to my mind, they really hadn’t thought it through. They asked people to put in a humongous amount of work on these presentations, to assemble teams and all of that, and then they wanted to give you a $5,000 project. It was really difficult to manage.

One of the better projects I got was to conceive of and implement a BIM server. The client came up with, “These are our requirements.” I went to a meeting, and I said, “Are you sure you want a BIM server? Because what you have here are the requirements for a document management system.” That was the one place where I got some traction. We went through and really looked at what the real requirements would be for a BIM server. I don’t know if anybody to this day has a true BIM server, because you really need to be managing the BIM on a component level to do it well. We did the specification and GSA circulated it. The BIM leaders, particularly in Europe, just said, “Wow, finally a specification for a BIM server.” It was really good, and it really addressed what you needed to address to manage a BIM successfully. Then we were supposed to go into implementation, and it turns out that the GSA BIM team hadn’t talked to PBS IT. They contacted IT to say, “We want to implement a BIM server next year,” and IT responded, “No, you cannot. We’ve got a X-year backlog on implementation requests.” Then, they punted, “Why don’t we just try some little things with some free software and some of our teams.” Again, it’s about getting a process standardized so it’s highly automated, really effective and dependable, and that isn’t where they ended. Maybe they eventually got there but they sure didn’t get there for that project. That was a real disappointment. The contract was a very prestigious award, let me tell you, but it was a big disappointment.

Then we have the work we did for Trammell Crow and the Tennessee Office of the State Architect. In the case of Trammell Crow, both designers and contractors would be contributing to the BIM. The problem definition questions were: what information did each design firm and contractor need to provide; at what point in the process should the data be there; what applications would be producing that BIM data; and how to do data checks to validate data delivery and conformance with the specification as you went along.

The State of Tennessee obviously is a state agency. Their thinking was quite advanced. Unfortunately, a lot of the practitioners in their state weren’t quite up to it but we used that SOM technique: if we had a willing BIM team, we energetically supported their success. If they had no idea how to do a COBie extraction, we would have somebody walk them through step by step, that kind of thing.

We did this on the Trammell Crow project too. Their client had a disconnect in that they hadn’t really determined what facility management system they were going to use but they were asking that the data be ready to load into that undefined future system before occupancy. In the case of Tennessee, they had decided, but they hadn’t started work on the facility management module. First, they were going to implement space planning or something, so they couldn’t tell us what they would want on the facility management end. On both of those projects, there was some massaging of the data at the handoff to make it work. It isn’t that we couldn’t make it work. We made it work. I think Tennessee got a little more stuck, but that was right when I retired.

IG: I wonder how challenging it was to implement the suggestions that you are providing in these large projects, that I am assuming have a lot of databases and a lot of information that might not have been coordinated from the beginning?

KF: It is very messy. What you are trying to do is work with lots of different softwares. But the focus is on the data requirements. What data do we need from you and when do we need it? I don’t care if you type this into an Excel spreadsheet. I don’t care if you put it in an Access database. The objects in BIM are fluid. There are ways to relate properties to an object outside of the system. We don’t care if it’s in Revit. But at some point, you’ve got to pull it out. Revit’s COBie exports at the time did not work so well, so how do we post-process? We did a lot, again, of taking off-the-shelf software and developing linkages and little manipulations of the data to make it all work. Essentially, we created an ad hoc BIM server. I think this is something where AI could be beneficial because it’s a level of detail that most design and construction professionals just don’t have the patience for, and AI is very patient.

IG: Were there other companies that you saw as your competitors?

KF: We had some competition, but they tended to be a little flat-footed. They were very often Autodesk products specific. They were also Autodesk resellers and they didn’t have the nimbleness to integrate all these pieces of software that didn’t really want to be hooked together. I think we had a really unique skill in that. We were really, really good at that.

IG: During that period of the late 2000s, you were very successfully working with a lot of larger organizations like the GSA and the Tennessee Office of the State Architect.

KF: Trammell Crow and the Tennessee Office of the State Architect were later. Tennessee was from 2012 until I retired really, and Trammell Crow was from 2014 until 2016. Those were some of my late projects.

IG: You turned over the office to Gregory Bush in 2017 and then you retired in 2018.

KF: I didn’t work very much in the year between. It was just that I was available. I did a proposal for them. I did a marketing piece for them. I showed up occasionally to answer questions. Up until that point, I had a lot of problems finding people who were quick on their feet technologically, knew something about the design and construction industry, and also were willing to work in a small firm for a woman. I mean, that was really tough until right at the end, when I had a really good team. That team just didn’t miss a beat, as best I can tell, when I left.

IG: Why did you decide to retire at that point?

KF: You have to retire. Our work was particularly challenging if you wanted to leave the business because most of these big five-year contracts build in a requirement that you maintain insurance and data for something like seven years past the end of the contract. It is not like being a sole practitioner where you can basically close the office. If a beloved client calls, maybe you do a little work for him. I either had to sell it to somebody who would assume the projects and the liability and all of that or I had to sell it to employees who would just keep it going.

IG: It makes sense. Working for these large institutions comes with other requirements, which for other large companies, it is easier to assume but perhaps not so much for smaller companies.

KF: Yeah. When I retired, we were about twelve people.

IG: Does the company that has been renamed now Bush Infotech Group continue to do the same work?

KF: Not entirely. Greg is really an IT guy. Remember, he was in the dot-com industry. He is not an architect. But I noticed that they did their own little conference, where the person who worked with me on Trammell Crow and Tennessee was talking about BIM and all of that. I think they must still be doing some work in that regard. And then, they are going into more areas of technology that we never did. We did a lot of software programming but using off-the-shelf software and customizing it to do certain things. I think they are starting to do real software development, developing their own software for smaller projects—collaboration systems that are not as costly to license or as difficult to implement.

IG: Throughout your career, there was a lot of publication work: you contributed to Architectural Record; you published the book The AEC Technology Survival Guide in 1997; you also published the book Leading the Digital Practice in 2002. You also spoke at a lot of conferences. Has some of that work writing or lecturing continued after your retirement?

KF: A wee bit. Not a lot. I think since retirement I have done a couple lectures in Virginia Tech as part of the [International Archive of Women in Architecture] IAWA Symposium. It may have been before I retired, I can’t remember. Martha Thorne invited me to Spain right after I retired to do a presentation there. She was involved with a university called IE. I also worked with a group of digital design data experts on the Born-Digital Design Records publication for the Society of American Archivists. I think that’s about it.

IG: Your work has been recognized in the architecture field. In 1995 you were made a Fellow of the AIA. It is interesting the work that you have done within the architecture discipline. To me, it is very interesting to see your work because it is…

KF: Very weird?

IG: It doesn’t fit in a clear discipline. You have been contributing to architecture and you are also managing information for people who don’t have to be in architecture. But even AIA recognizes your contributions to the architecture discipline. I think it is great to see organizations that sometimes operate in silos recognizing that work.

KF: I can’t say why the AIA elected me a Fellow. I had a very good person help me put together the application, which makes a big difference. Carol Ross Barney was my sponsor. At the time I applied for fellowship, I got very good letters. Back then, you could see your letters. Doug Stoker just said I was amazingly effective in the adoption of technology among architects. Ken Schroeder said I was setting up all the technology for the architecture department at UIC. The editor at Architectural Record, Steve Kliment, said I was a wonderful writer who always had something to say. I had letters from all over the place: from academia, from professionals, from the software industry. I had a CAD vendor talk about working with me when I was out doing a software procurement, and how perceptive I was on that. I was very active. I was always very active in the AIA until much later when the computer committees began to be dominated by younger people, which is as it should be. I served on the AIA Chicago Board and the AIA Illinois Board.

My last big involvement with AIA was the National Technology in Architectural Practice Advisory group, which I chaired in 2007. That was a five-year appointment and that coincided the birth of BIM. We organized the first AIA BIM awards. The first year, we didn’t ask for outside jurors because we were afraid we wouldn’t get any entries. We had an annual conference in Washington called “Building Connections” and people came from all over the world to talk about data exchange. It was a data exchange conference. There are reasons why I was recognized. In addition to making a huge impact for these big public clients, people at SOM loved me. I could always go back and people would say nice things. When Adrian Smith started his own office, he asked us to be his technology consultant, and we were. We set up his whole office. I had done a lot of work for a lot of architects in Chicago. People knew me. I think in the last ten years or so of my career, I was less involved. But then in Tennessee, everybody knew me.

IG: I think there are these seminal moments when you see a profession change and move from one phase to another. In those moments, there are people who are instrumental in understanding that transition, being part of it, and helping others to get there. I think this is something that you have had a key role in.

As you have mentioned, you were very involved in AIA National and in AIA Chicago. I’d like to also talk about your being an alum of Virginia Tech and the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), which is based there. Can you talk about your involvement with that?

KF: My thesis advisor was a woman by the name of Milka Bliznakov. She was a Bulgarian architect who had practiced in Bulgaria, France, and the United States. She got a doctorate at Columbia University in architectural history when she came to the United States. Milka was a wonderful person. She kept in touch. I was just so amazed. I first started to work at SOM, and I got a phone call or a letter from Milka. I don’t know how she found me. She said, “I’m going to be passing through Chicago. Do you want to get together?” She used to do that every couple of years. If I went down to Virginia Tech to speak or be on alum committees, she would say, “Why don’t you stay with me?” At some point in 1985, she went to the dean and said, “I’m teaching architectural history based on the curriculum and the books. Why aren’t we teaching about any women architects?” And Charlie Steger said, “Because there aren’t any.”

She somehow— and I don’t know the details— convinced the whole university that they should develop this archive in the Special Collections of the university library system. Milka was a fluent speaker of Bulgarian, English, French, Russian, and German, so she was writing letters to people she knew all over the world, asking them to send work, and particularly work of women who were early pioneers and had died. And she got it. She drew me into this at some point. Not at the very, very beginning but I have been involved at least since the early ’90s. The IAWA has gone through a lot of permutations as an organization, but it is just something I owe to Milka. Plus, I do care. In fact, I think she was way ahead of her time. We now see in almost all professions, typically women going back and saying, “Wait a minute. This lawyer, this doctor, this... Really, it was the wife who was the X, Y, Z, and just everything was under the guy’s name.” That is where the prize came from.

I went to one of the symposia and there was an amazing amount of discussion about that phenomenon. Particularly in small firms where there was a woman and a man, maybe they were or weren’t married, but the woman was getting the clients and doing all the technical details and the guy was the front office designer. It occurred to me that it was relatively easy in a small firm to figure this out because you could tell different people’s hands. But in the large firms, that is totally erased. I guess this is the reason why I established the Kristine Fallon Prize. We have done two editions of the award now.

IG: The IAWA Kristine Fallon Prize was established in 2021.

KF: Yeah. The pandemic got very much in the way.

IG: What is the goal of the award?

KF: The initial goal was to tease out the women who worked in large group practices in the second half of the twentieth century. I was thinking even the third quarter, so World War II to maybe ’80, a little before my generation. There was never any attribution to those who participated in the projects at SOM. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry who ever worked at the firm claims credit for all sorts of projects. They were concerned about it. I was concerned that, in all of this pushing and shoving, the women were getting really pushed out. I had a conversation with Natalie De Blois one time, and she was very upset where that had happened. The first couple of awards had to do with that. This year, I want to go back. I went and talked to the board because I really want to do Afghan women in design, kind of broadly, because they have disappeared quickly. The Afghan women have totally disappeared. I don’t know if we can find them, but that is what I’d like to do.

IG: You are providing monetary resources for people to research and shine a light on these architects.

KF: That’s the idea. The way it is structured now. I wanted to just make an annual award, but the faculty suggested that, particularly academic researchers, really don’t want to do a major research project without compensation. The way we are doing it now is there is a proposal phase. One year, people submit proposals and up to five are selected. The winning five get a $500 stipend to pursue that. It is only the five of them who then compete for the final $5,000 award, which apparently is more acceptable to everyone.

IG: Where would the outcome of the award be available?

KF: It’s not just the outcome of the award. I am insisting that all materials submitted be donated to the IAWA collection. We don’t really have a great mass right now. But if we get ten submissions, there might be some very interesting topics that someone could find, because the libraries have good online resources, and say, “Wow. That would make a great doctoral dissertation,” or something like that. They’ll give a hint into some other areas that haven’t been nailed or explored in depth but still tell you something. That’s the point I’m pushing. I don’t know if the materials can be added to the collections. “Yes, you have to make that a requirement of the prize.” Everybody is worried about intellectual property and all of that. I’m nothing if not persistent so I think it will work out.

IG: Your own work is also archived at the special collections. If someone wants to know more in particular about your work, is that the best place to find it?

KF: Yeah. I think so. I have not pursued to see how available they are or anything

IG: I have browsed their website, and the content is listed properly. You can see the type of information that you have in the boxes.

KF: Okay. Good.

IG: Thank you very much for your time, Kristine.

KF: Thank you.

SELECTED PROJECTS

State of Tennesse, Office of the State Architect (OSA)
BIM/VDC Program, 2012–2018

• Worked collaboratively with state agencies, with OSA’s High Performance Building initiative, designers and contractors serving the state, construction counsel and insurers
• Wrote BIM requirements for both design and construction
• Organized a BIM workshop in coordination with AIA TN
• Conducted outreach to BIM, project management and facility management software vendors
• Developed checking tools to validate consultant and contractor deliverables
• Developed and conducted BIM training for state’s project managers
• Worked with facility management contractor and software implementer to align data requirements, data structure and terminology
• Supported BIM pilot project teams
• Began Close Out and Data Turnover on BIM pilot projects
• Planned Lessons Learned session and updated version of the state’s BIM Standard incorporating those lessons.

Trammell Crowm Company (TCC)
Project Go, 2014–2016

• Build-to-suit corporate campus consisted of seven buildings (1.7 million SF) and site improvements
• Goal of TCC’s client was to have all space and equipment data loaded into their space and maintenance management system before occupancy
• Assisted the client in developing their data requirements
• Developed a COBie (Construction to Operations Building information exchange) Execution Plan incorporating those requirements
• Developed a software tool to capture and validate data from the source, at the time created. The tool interfaced with mobile technology to support field data entry and barcoding
• Re-engineered key business processes to streamline data capture
• Supported both the design and construction teams in data delivery
• Validated all data received
• Introduced Lean principles and methods to ensure timely delivery
• By Substantial Completion on January 20, 2016, all space and equipment data, delivered in COBie format, had been loaded into the client’s space and maintenance management system:
  • Spaces
  • Equipment standards
  • Individual assets
  • Performance data for equipment
  • Warranties
  • Spare parts (as data)
  • Preventive maintenance and other equipment-related procedures

PennDOT
Rapid Bridge Replacement P3 Project, 2015–2018

• P3 project to replace 558 bridges in three years
• Led team tasked with putting in place within three months a highly automated system for:
  • Document management
  • Reviewing 50 design submittals per bridge within specific timeframes
  • Producing project reports and dashboards
• Following Financial Close, implemented additional automated process to support construction, closeout and transfer to O&M

Capital Development Board (CDB) of IL
2010

• Served as AIA Illinois representative to a BIM Advisory committee convened by CDB
• Recommended and conducted a survey of BIM use by both designers and contractors in the state
• Selected by CDB to facilitate and chair a presentation of BIM recommendations to the CDB and its client agencies by the architecture, engineering, general contractor and subcontractor associations

Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA) $3 billion Capital Improvement Program
CTSpace ProjectNet Web-Based Project Management System, 2001–2003
Follow-On System Specification, RFP Development and Vendor Evaluation, 2009–2010
e-Builder Project Management System Implementation Oversight and Administration, 2010–2017

• Applied Web-based project management system in a comprehensive fashion to a major public infrastructure capital program for the first time in the US in 2001
• Defined requirements, developed software RFP, evaluated responses, recommended vendor, managed product configuration, developed CTA-specific documentation and training system, rolled out ProjectNet system
• In 2009–2010, led the KFA team that developed and documented system requirements for a follow-on system to ProjectNet
• Assisted CTA in development of RFP and evaluation criteria as well as participated in vendor evaluations
• Oversaw implementation, configuration and testing of selected solution, e-Builder

Chicago Transit Authority
Research and Analyze Next-Generation Engineering Software and Data Management Requirements, 2013

• Benchmarked other transit agencies
• Defined appropriate methods, business processes, and staff responsibilities for managing, accessing, and updating engineering information about existing system conditions, active projects and archived projects
• Advised on new technologies that can be exploited to support CTA Engineering’s multiple roles and engineering information management
• Developed a conceptual model for CTA Engineering’s future processes and supporting technology tools
• Developed a Transition Plan to CTA-preferred next generation design and data management software

General Services Administration (GSA)
PBS National 3D-4D BIM Program Central Office, 2009–2012

• BIM training
• BIM Guide 08 for Facilities Management
• BIM model checking development
• BIM server research and requirements definition

Infrastructure Ontario
e-Builder Online Collaboration and Project Management System, 2008–2010

• Consulted on RFP strategy for Online Collaboration and Project Management System procurement
• Assisted in writing the RFP, evaluating vendor proposals and presentations and conducting reference checks
• Supervised KFA team responsible for requirements definition, acceptance testing of custom workflows and development of User Manual

US Army Corps of Engineers
ERDC-CERL BIM Research Projects

• Experimental BIMs (2011)
• Sustainability Product Properties (2011)
• Specifiers’ Properties Information Exchange (SPie) (2011–2012)
• COBie Calculator (2013)
• Ontologies for Electrical and Water Distribution Information Exchanges (2013)

Financial Services Firm
Global Real Estate Knowledge Management Initiative, 2011

• Developed comprehensive recommendations for managing building information during design and construction and, particularly, improving processes and tools for the handover of information from construction to facility operations and management
• Worked with the firm’s facility groups worldwide and recommended global requirements, standards, processes, roles, and technology solutions to support the firm’s 14 million SF, $700 million annual capital program
• Developed BIM design and construction requirements for two projects

University of Illinois
BIM Standards Development, May–August, 2012

• “Introduction to BIM” for selected University stakeholders
• Reviewed and compared BIM Standards from other universities and public agencies
• Recommended changes to U of I CAD standards and deliverables necessary to accommodate BIM
• Developed of BIM standards for the University of Illinois

National Institutes of Health
Enhanced Construction Program, 2010–2011

• BIM Strategy and Implementation Plan
• Division 1 BIM language

Walsh Healthcare Division BIM Program, 4 Projects, 2006–2010
VA Spinal Cord Injury & Disorder Center, Minneapolis
Sherman Replacement Hospital, Elgin, IL
Louis Stokes VA Medical Center, Cleveland
Malcolm Randall VA Medical Center, Gainesville, FL

• Structured design/build BIM pilot
• Developed construction phase 3D MEP coordination approach for Walsh Healthcare Division
• Methodology was applied to three hospital projects with a combined construction value of over $577 million
• Developed modeling standards and execution plans, supported subcontractors and provided architectural and structural modeling services
• Surveyed users and conducted Lessons Learned sessions to document best practices

Illinois Tollway
Implementation of Web-Based Project Collaboration and Management System, 2006

• Developed a methodology for successful implementation and rollout of web-based project collaboration and management technology on an in-progress $6 billion capital program
• Managed the team that executed the fastest configuration and rollout of Proliance On Demand ever achieved; effort resulted in a zero-defect configuration of Proliance On Demand
• System delivered major improvements in business process cycle times: within a year, Issue resolution dropped from 50 to 15 days and RFI resolution dropped from 30 days to 10

The Art Institute of Chicago
Collecting, Archiving and Exhibiting Digital Design Data, 2002–2004

• Led an 18-month research project on creating electronic archives of born-digital design data created by architects and industrial designers
• Precedent-setting report provided guidance on technology, standards and work processes for creating and maintaining such digital archives
• The study tasks included:
  • International survey of digital design tool use
  • Case studies (9) that analyzed work processes within design firms
  • Compilation of recommendations on scanning from multiple archival institutions and previous studies
  • Review meetings with Advisory Committee of senior representatives from museums and archival institutions, universities, design firms and technology companies
  • Design charrette to develop exhibition concepts for digital design data
  • Documentation of comprehensive recommendations on preparing, collecting, cataloging, storing, preserving, and presenting digital design data
  • Presentation of these findings at national and international conferences
    
• The Department of Architecture of The Art Institute of Chicago retained KFA to implement the study’s recommendations

Revit Technology Corporation
Consulting, 1999–2001

• Consulted to Revit Technology Corporation before their initial software product release
• Organized a group of design firm principals to define requirements for a “next-generation CAD system”
• These requirements formed the basis of an extensive evaluation of 6 early “BIM” products published by PSMJ Resources, Inc. as CAD Software Evaluation Report, 2001

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Kristine Fallon for providing personal photographs and illustrations of Kristine Fallon Associates, Inc. Thanks to Karen Widi, Manager of Library, Records and Information Services at SOM, for her help providing photographs and drawings of the SOM buildings and equipment included in this oral history. Thanks to Molly Hanse for the help copyediting the interview.