Dialogues: Linda Searl

Linda received both her Bachelor of Architecture and Master of Arts in Architecture from the University of Florida. Prior to becoming principal of her own firm, Searl and Associates (later Searl Lamaster Howe Architects), she was an Associate Architect at Nagle Hartray and Associates. She now is enjoying life in retirement, returning to the office on occasion to work on select projects.

Her professional achievements include receiving the 2024 AIA Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award and membership in Architectural Digest’s AD100, a list of the world's top architects and designers. Linda’s award-winning work has been published nationally in Architectural Record, Architecture, Chicago Magazine, and Interior Design to name a few. Exhibitions of her work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Athenaeum, State of Illinois Building, Chicago Architectural Club, Chicago Historical Society, and the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

Linda is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Her professional activities include serving as a past President of Chicago Women in Architecture, President of the AIA Chicago Chapter, and Vice President and Regional Director of the National AIA. She has participated on juries for AIA Distinguished Building Awards in a number of other cities and nationally and has served as Chair of the Design Committee of AIA Chicago.

Her community activities include having served on the Chicago Plan Commission for twenty-five years and as chair of the group from 2003 to 2012. Linda is a former member of the Steering Committee for Chicago’s Central Area Plan and was co-chair of the Urban Design Task Force. She has also served as Exhibition Chair and President of The Contemporary Arts Council, Chair of the Board of Trustees at Archeworks, and as a board member at Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois and the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She is currently a member of several organizations including the Economic Club of Chicago and the Chicago Network.

Her teaching experience includes visiting professorships at the Universities of Oklahoma, Illinois, Florida, Wisconsin, and Washington University. Linda was also a visiting lecturer on various architecture/design topics at Washington University, Pratt Institute, Notre Dame University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Wisconsin and North Carolina.

Iker: We are going to conduct your oral history in a chronological order. To start, can you let us know when where were you born?

Linda Searl: I was born in Detroit, Michigan. My mom and dad both grew up in Michigan. My dad lived in East Lansing, Michigan. They met at Michigan State. I was born on March 28, 1947, just a couple of years after World War II. My dad was in the war, but he went there very late. He went in December of ’44. He was involved a little bit in the Battle of the Bulge. The war ended in May of 1945. Since he hadn’t been in service that long, he ended up staying there and came back in June of ’46. I was born in March of 1947, exactly nine months after he was back, which I always think is funny. We lived in East Lansing until I was six years old.

My dad worked for the company that my grandfather was working for called Auto-Owners Insurance Company based in Lansing, Michigan. He was a smoker and he got pneumonia twice in one winter. Auto-Owners had decided that they were going to open a branch office in Florida. They decided the best place to put it was right in smack dab in the middle of Florida in Lakeland, which is between Tampa and Orlando, right on the I-4 corridor. We moved to Florida when I was six years old. I started my first grade in Lakeland, Florida.

IG: That would be 1953?

LS: Right.

IG: What was your father’s name?

LS: William Searl. Bill Searl, Jr. My grandfather was also William, so he was senior. My dad was junior. By the time we left, my mom and dad had my sister Barbara, who was two years younger than me. My sister Char was born two years later. My mother was pregnant when we moved to Florida, and she had my brother. I think we probably moved in August, and she had my brother in October of 1953. Everybody was two years apart. I think my mother was a wreck by the time all that happened. She had four kids in a row.

I was the oldest. I think being the oldest child has some influence on how you deal with your life and your peers and things. Some of my earliest memories are from when we were still in Michigan. We had this house that was up on a hill, and the driveway was way down. There was a really brightly lit moon night. I went into my parents’ bedroom and I said, “Dad, I want to go ride my bike.” It had to be my tricycle, because I wasn’t even that old when we lived in this house. And he said, “Okay. Just go ahead and do it.” And so, I did. I think what I learned is that because I had two parents that were loving and cared for me, I hardly ever had any fear. I think that affected me a lot in the rest of my life.

When we moved to Lakeland, Florida, we could walk to school. I walked to every school I went to except for one, which was a private school in 5th grade. In all our neighborhoods, kids were friends; this is the baby boomer time. We would play in the street in front of our house. We lived on Shady Lane in Lakeland. One street north of us was Camphor Drive and it had these beautiful giant camphor trees. It was one of those streets with a tunnel of trees. It was beautiful. We had no trees on Shady Lane; that was what was so ironic. It was this neighborhood that was just getting built. My mom and dad worked with a builder. They built this house for $25,000 back then. It was a three-bedroom home with two baths and seven-foot ceilings. It was completely a ranch house. We lived this very simple but somewhat happy life. I had no fear, and that made a big difference for me.

IG: Does the house still exist?

LS: It does. My parents sold it in 1973. I think it was the year I graduated from University of Florida. I was like, “Oh, no. You sold that house.” But they moved to this beautiful house in the woods, which was very nice. I can’t say it was the wrong thing for them to do.

IG: Can you talk about your mother?

LS: When we were kids, until I was 10 or 11, she [Lois] was mostly just a housewife, but she did really interesting things. She knew how to sew, and she would make Easter outfits for us. She didn’t really love to cook, but she did it. But the meals we would eat would be like, one night it’d be hot dogs and baked beans, and then one night it might be hamburgers or chicken or something. She only cooked like three vegetables: corn, spinach, and peas. That was it. I didn’t even know what a zucchini was until I went to college and I met my boyfriend whose parents were from Italy and had a grocery store that was in Toronto before they moved to Florida. They sold a lot of vegetables. He was like, “What? You’ve never had a zucchini? You’ve never had a yellow squash?” “No, I never had those.” I guess you could say I wasn’t exposed to a lot of crazy stuff that was going on then.

Going back to my mother, she had gotten her degree in education, and she wanted to go back and start teaching. She taught at this really sweet little school where my two sisters went. It was called Child’s Garden of Learning, and it was so cute. I was having trouble with my 4th grade teacher that year. I had always loved all my teachers before this. They were very nice. I even have a couple of my report cards in here that I found. One of my teachers wrote on the side, “I wish you were my little girl.” That’s so funny. My mother started teaching there, and she taught me 4th grade math, which was really interesting: not to have a teacher that wasn’t just somebody you didn’t know; it was your mother teaching you something. She was good at it; she was a very good teacher. I also started learning French there, which I really loved. After 4th grade, I went to this other private school for a year, and I don’t think they had French. So, my mother said, “I’ll take you to the French teacher, and you can just have lessons with her.” I did that all the way up through maybe 7th grade or so, taking French. She drilled the verbs into me. This French teacher’s husband was a painter. He convinced my mother to paint all four of us, her children. I still have that portrait today. It’s fun. I don’t love it because I was very serious, but it was interesting to have your portrait painted when you are twelve years old.

IG: Was French something that was offered in school to everybody or something that you elected to study?

LS: No, not in Florida’s schools then. I finally got to high school, and then they offered languages, because most kids, if they were going to go to college, had to have a language. I got back into French in high school. But the teacher had horrible pronunciation, and I was like, “Oh, I was so much better.” I can’t do it now. I realize that if you get away for too long, it’s really hard to get back. I was doing Duolingo before we went to France this year, and then, when I got to France, I was like, “I can’t do it. They’re too good.” But at least I could understand them.

IG: You always remember something, even if you are not fluent anymore.

LS: Right. We also took Latin starting in 8th grade, which I thought was interesting. This teacher was our math teacher, who taught us algebra and trigonometry, and then she also taught Latin. We had this little group of friends who were all really studious. But we were still popular, if you can imagine being both. In high school, we needed one more year of Latin to finish Latin 4. We took a summer class and did our last year of Latin that year.

We all went to summer school together. I don’t know if kids would even consider doing that today. I realized I loved math a lot. I did like languages. I loved to read. Even in grammar school, they had these little books in the library, and you could just take one out that was a biography of somebody. We didn’t have big homework; we had little homework. I would get home, and then I would start reading the book. I think that influenced me a lot because I was realizing these people did something in their lives. They had a purpose or an idea, and they followed through with it. I’m trying to think of when I really decided I wanted to be an architect. I had a friend who lived next door. Our house was always crazy. Four kids, four dogs, two parents. My dad would come home and he would say, “Linda, can you just take care of your brother?” I’m like 8, and my brother is 2. I was thinking, “I don’t want to take care of my brother.” I would try to escape whenever I could. I had this friend who lived next door to us. Her father was a three or four star general in the army in World War II. Her parents were older. She was probably maybe a year or two older than I was, but she was an only child. I could go over to her house, and we would do something together. We would play anything we wanted to there. We made a city one day or one week, let’s say. Her mother was an interior designer, although I don’t remember her very well. They were a very quiet family compared to ours. I think this must have been 6th or 7th grade that I wanted to do something like that.

IG: Be an interior designer?

LS: Either design or maybe it was related to cities; I didn't know yet. I didn’t even know anybody who was an architect. That got me on a little bit of a path. I told my sister recently, and she said, “Linda, you are the only one I know who ever knew what they wanted to be before they were in the 8th grade.” I was surprised, “Really? I didn’t know that.”

IG: Did any of your siblings study anything related to the built environment?

LS: No. My two sisters, Char and Barbara, both ended up in journalism. My younger sister, Char, had always liked to draw, so she went in as an artist and started in, I think, Palm Beach. My sister Barbara and my sister Char never finished college. In fact, I’m the only one of my siblings who did, because I was committed and convinced that I had to do this. I was wondering, “Why don’t they want to do this?” You could get into journalism without much of a degree back then.

My sister Barbara was a good writer. She became an editor. Working at the Lakeland Ledger was one of her first jobs. Over this period of time—between grammar school, junior high, high school—that’s what we had. Grammar school was 1st through 6th grade, and then junior high was 7th through 9th, and then high school was 10th, 11th, and 12th. It’s all different now. But that’s how it was for us.

As time passed, my mom had a couple friends, and these friends convinced my mother she should run for city council. And she did. This was probably when I was in 10th grade. She was glamorous. She was five foot nine, pretty tall. I’m sure I looked up to her then a lot, even though there were times I didn’t love her.

IG: A mother-daughter relationship is sometimes complicated.

LS: Yes. Exactly. Much later in my life, my best friend told me, “Your mother always competed with you.” And I went, “Really?” I never thought of it that way.

This doctor was the mayor of Lakeland. The mayor was voted on, not by the whole population, but within the city council members. Dr. West was the mayor, but he was also a practicing doctor. He decided that he just couldn’t be mayor. My mom was in the city commission and became mayor pro tem. He said, “Lois, I want you to take over being the mayor.” I’m in 11th grade, I think. She was mayor while I was in my junior or senior year of high school. I got called “politician” from my chemistry teacher. He gave everybody a nickname, and mine was “politician.” That influenced me more than I know. I lost her; I mean, we all did because she was never home. She was totally dedicated to doing this. This was 1965. A lot of cities were very closed in terms of what you could learn about them, where they spent their money, all that kind of stuff. In Florida, it became government in the sunshine. You had to say, “Here’s our city budget. This is how we spend money here.” My mother fought really hard with the city manager and a couple of others to get that to happen. She would spend hours looking at the budget and trying to find out, “Why are they spending $10,000 on typewriters or something,” things that didn’t look right. She really pushed and questioned them. Of course, they hated her.

IG: I can imagine that. It’s important to share the budget in a transparent way.

LS: It is. As much as I was wondering, “Well, where’s my mother?” I can’t talk to her,” she was doing something beyond us, and that really affected me more than I knew.

IG: She was the first female mayor of a Florida city of over 50,000 people.

LS: She was. She was.

IG: Quite an accomplishment.

LS: One thing in school that is a great memory for me is that they would say, “There’s going to be a satellite taking off in ten minutes. Let’s go out in the schoolyard and we can watch it.” From Lakeland, we could see Cape Canaveral launches. It was amazing. We all were like, “Oh, yeah, just another satellite going off, a rocket going off.” It was so commonplace for us.

IG: You already had an interest in design and architecture. Were there any classes in high school that were geared to architecture?

LS: In junior high, the girls took home economics and the guys took shop. I wanted to take shop, but they wouldn’t let me. I said, “Okay, I’ll go to home economics.” The teacher was horrible. Anyway, my best friend Donna and I got to high school. Donna and I are like this close. I said, “I think I want to be an architect, so what could I take?” “There’s a drafting class.” “Okay, maybe I’ll take that. Would you take it with me?” She goes, “Yeah, sure. I’ll take it with you.” We took the drafting class together. There were thirty guys, Donna, me, and one other girl in that class. The guys would say, “Girls can’t be architects.” They would walk up to us and tell us, “Why are you doing this?” I loved the class, but my friend Donna didn’t like it at all. I said, “I think I really want to do this.” That was 10th grade. But there was nothing else I could take after that. I should have taken physics, which I didn’t, because I wanted to be a cheerleader. I’ll show you one of my cheerleading pictures. My English teacher wanted me to be editor of the senior yearbook. I said, “No. I’d rather be a cheerleader, because it is worth it to me.” You had to do one or the other. You couldn’t do both. I wanted to be an architect, but I had a boyfriend, and he would say, “You don't want to do that. That’s not what girls do.” And it was “girls”; it wasn’t “women.” I got talked out of it by my senior year. Donna and I decided we wanted to go to this girl’s school in Atlanta. I think we probably both applied to a couple of different ones, but we got early acceptance at Agnes Scott in Atlanta. I thought, “Well, I think I’ll study psychology instead of architecture.” I always wanted to understand what made people who they are. I got there. I could take French, I could take calculus, which I needed to take, and English or a few others, but they would not let me take psychology. It was already full. I was like, “What? This is the only thing I really wanted to take.”

I got there, and both Donna and I decided we hated the place. We did not want to be there. Emory and Georgia Tech were nearby. I thought, “Maybe I’ll go over to Georgia Tech and see what their school of architecture is like.” I went there, and they were very nice. They said, “We would love to have you come here.” Merrill Elam and her husband, Mack Scogin, would have been students at about the same time.

I looked at Georgia Tech, and I went, “This is too much engineering for me. I don’t think I want to go there.” I went back home that summer, and I said to my dad, “I don’t want to go back to Agnes Scott.” He was very unhappy, because he was so proud that I was going to this somewhat prestigious girl’s school. I said, “I want to be an architect.” My mother said, “If this is what you want to do, then you should do it.” She was very enabling in that way. She believed we should be what we wanted to be.

My sister wanted to be an artist. She really did become one for a long time at the newspapers. Now you hardly ever see a hand-drawn drawing. She did some beautiful hand drawings for the newspapers. My dad was very conservative. But my mother really understood that there were things that if we wanted to do them, we should do them. My dad said, “If you want to go to architecture school, you are going to have to go to University of Florida.” I said, “Fine. I’ll go there.” It was one of those like, “I don’t care where I go.” I might have cared later, but at the time, I was just saying, “Okay. I’ll go there.”

IG: You didn’t really apply, look, or know the architecture programs of other universities?

LS: I didn’t at all. Florida was interesting, though, because they had a lot of young faculty members who were pretty much just out of their own schools. They would let the faculty do what the faculty wanted to do. I had to take freehand drawing, which was great, because I wasn’t like my husband, Joe Valerio. His mother would send him to the Art Institute of Chicago on the bus from Andersonville. He would take the bus, go to Art Institute, and take a drawing class. He’s been drawing his whole life. I would do some drawings as a child, but I don’t ever think I was that great at it. I said, “What I’m going to do is give myself a year at University of Florida. If I don’t do well or I don’t like it, then I’ll go do something else.”

IG: What year did you start?

LS: I was at Agnes Scott from ’65 to ’66. I went to Florida fall of ’66. We had this basic design class; we had a drawing class; and then you still had to take other regular courses. I had to take physics, which was, for me, terrible. We had the worst teacher, and it was a class of 200 people in the room kind of stuff. Science was not my strength then, although I love science now. It’s one of my favorite things to think about or read about. It’s funny how you change.

That year, I had a professor for basic design; his name was Bernie Voichysonk. He had gone to Yale and studied with Albers. He did a whole color theory sequence of projects. I thought, “I love these. These are great.” We did figure-ground studies, all that kind of basic stuff that you learn, at least at most of the really good architecture schools. Bernie was really an artist. He was not an architect. Bernie became a friend over the time I was at University of Florida. It turned out he was gay. I’d never met a gay person in my life. “This is a whole new thing I didn’t know about.” That’s how protected, I guess I would call myself, as a child I was, realizing, “what I don’t know is amazing.”

My mother did things that I didn’t know affected me. She had a hairdresser in Lakeland who was also gay. They put the guy in jail for whatever he did, I don’t know, something probably stupid in this day and age. He basically got run out of town. My mother bailed him out of jail. That’s how he got out. Then, he just said, “I’ve got to go to someplace else. I can’t stay here.” She also did things going back to our junior high and high school days. Because she didn’t love to cook, and then she became involved in teaching and then in city council and everything, we would have a Black woman who would come and clean the house and usually cook dinner for us too. Her name was Ollie, Oliver. She had a son, Bobby. For a couple years, we took swimming classes in the summer at this coach Barker’s house up the street. I got my certification to be a lifeguard. The year between my junior and senior year of high school, I taught swimming at the city pool. But they did not allow Black people to be at the city pool in Lakeland, Florida. And this pissed me off. Bobby wanted to learn how to swim. We had a pool because my brother had a bone disease when he was a young kid, and they said swimming for him would be very good. I said, “Ollie, bring Bobby over to the house. I’m going to teach him how to swim.” And I did. He was probably eight years old, and I was sixteen or so. And he learned. I realized later, much later, that Black people in the South were never taught to swim. If they did something wrong, white people would throw them in the water and they would drown. I mean, it took me a long time to understand that. It took me a long time to understand the prejudice that was there. It just makes me so mad.

At some point, Bobby really wanted a little red toy firetruck, something like that. At my mom’s memorial service, Bobby came back to the service. I’m asking, “Bobby, how are you?” He says, “I’m great. I went into the Navy; I taught other guys how to swim. I’ve had this great career in the Navy and everything.” I’m like, “Wow, amazing.” And then he tells a story that when my mom was mayor, he really wanted this truck. She got the fire department to come in their truck and bring him a little truck. I’m like, “Oh my God.” I didn’t even know she did that. It is amazing how those things happened and you don’t know until fifty years later. My mom was more than I knew. They were from Michigan. They didn’t think like these Southern Baptists, whoever they were, thought like that. It was really hard for me to understand these prejudices.

IG: It’s great to see that once she was in power, she did everything she could to change things.

LS: She did.

IG: She made sure to do small things that made an impact during that time.

LS: Yeah, exactly. A good summary there.

IG: I want to go back to talking the University of Florida. You talked about one of the faculty members that was influential to you. Were there any other ones?

LS: Yes. After that first year, I said, “I think I can do this.” It was my second year of college but my first year of architecture. There was this third year where I had to sort of say to myself, “Do I really know what I’m doing here?” I really knew nothing about architecture, really nothing. The basics were good. I loved getting all that drawing and design information and figure-ground and those kinds of basics, information, skills, and theory, I guess you would call it. Third year for me was kind of my struggle. I got into class and there was this professor, Lee Shaw. He was also young; most everybody then was a hippie, right? Long hair, wide ties, all that stuff. I was struggling in his class, and it was the first kind of real architectural design class. One project was sort of like an animal park or something. I didn’t know what to do. He said to me, “I don’t know if girls should be architects.” And I said, “Well, I am going to be one.” It was like he knew. Now that I think about it, I think he said it to make me feel like I had to commit to this. The next semester I decided to catch up on structures, materials, and history classes and not take a design class. I got a job in an office there, because I had worked in an office over the summers when I was back home for my first couple of years.

IG: In an architecture office?

LS: Yeah.

IG: What was the name of it?

LS: The first one I worked at was Wellman-Lord Engineering Inc., which was an engineering office. I had done some drafting stuff; I was sort of good at it. They had this group of Cubans there. The Cuban Missile Crisis had happened while I was still in high school. These guys were amazing draftsmen. They really taught me how to draw a good line. I worked there the first summer. The next summer I worked at Warren Smith’s office. He was a super nice guy. He had a small office, and I would do corrections on drawings, things like that, for the second summer. I had a little bit of office experience. I got that semester of my third year, and I worked in an office in Gainesville. That helped. Then I got into fourth year of design, and I did okay. I wouldn’t say I was ever the A+ as a designer, but I was getting my feet on the ground about it.

IG: Do you feel that, by that point, you had caught up?

LS: I had caught up with what I thought were important things, the technical side of things; that helped me. Fourth year was like, “I think I can do this now.” I think it was in my fourth year that I ended up with this boyfriend. His name was Grant. He was my boyfriend for ten years, and we almost got married. I discovered he was having an affair with one of his students. I said, “No, I’m done.” That ended that whole thing. Through these next few years, we were good friends. We ended up living in an apartment together, I think during my fifth year.

Another friend of ours, Dick Moore, had been to Vietnam in the Army. He came back to Gainesville to finish school, and his dad was an architect. Dick was a little bit older than we were, because he had been drafted and then he still wanted to be an architect and came back to school. He told us about Vietnam. He would say, “We would be sitting in the jungle, a snake would come up and bite one of us, and we’d say, ‘Here, have a cigarette because you’re going to be dead after you’ve finished smoking this.’” We were freaked out and not really understanding what was going on in Vietnam until we met him. It was like, “What are we doing here while this is going on?”

I had Larry Peterson as a professor; he became one of my very influential professors later. I think I had Larry in my fourth year of design. In my fifth year we got Harry Weese. Harry gave us an ambassador’s residence in London [as a studio project]. We were like, “What the fuck? How can you be giving us such an irrelevant project when the Vietnam War is going on over there?” We were really struggling with this, all of us, and we did it, because we didn’t have a choice, but we were so against it. We all did our own project. We went there later when we were traveling in Europe. By the way, I never traveled with my parents. They never went anywhere. “I want to go to New York. I want to go here. Get me out of here.” That was how I felt about Lakeland, Florida. I thought I would never learn anything if I stayed there.

IG: Did you study abroad while you were at the University of Florida?

LS: One summer, and this was the summer. We never had a whole semester.

We all did something [for Harry Weese’s studio with the ambassador’s residence assignment]. I think my boyfriend Grant did a project where it was just a completely glass façade. He wasn’t going to copy all those other façades. I don’t even remember what I did. We all got horrible grades. We barely passed. The next project that came along, we had [Leornardo] Ricci from Italy. He came to the University of Florida and he did megastructures. We were supposed to do a megastructure in St. Petersburg, Florida. The assignment was an urban renewal for a neighborhood. We went there and we studied the people that lived there, because I kept saying, “What about the people who live there? What are we doing for them?” What we did instead were low-rise buildings with porches, because everybody there had a porch. They were in this neighborhood called Methodist Town. It was just sort of like [Robert] Moses running people out of New York for the highways he built. I was like, “We can’t do that.” We won first place because we didn’t do a megastructure.

IG: It is remarkable that, at that time, you already had a sense of what was appropriate and what was not, and challenged the brief that a professor would give you.

LS: Yes. Yes. We were like, “Wait a minute, this is not right.” We started that kind of protest. There were also protests on the campus about the war. “This can’t be right, what are we doing?” The only thing we could really do was say, “I don’t believe in a megastructure; I don’t believe in an ambassador’s house in London; what I should be doing is something relevant, whether it was a veteran’s facility or something that made sense.” We went to Europe in the summer of 1970 and then came back; I graduated in 1971. We were awarded $300 for winning the prize [for the project for Methodist Town].

IG: That is what you used to go to Europe.

LS: $5 a day, literally. We bought a Volkswagen bus in Luxembourg, where we landed. We drove to Greece. That’s where everything started. It was like this mindset that we had. We raced through Austria, what was then Yugoslavia, and then the bus broke down. We ended up in this little town in Yugoslavia called Gevgelija [now in Macedonia], which was only about three or four miles from the border with Greece. This family took us in because their son was a mechanic. He said, “I can fix your bus. You can just stay right here.” We were living in the bus, and it turned out, the problem was the transmission. It was a Volkswagen, and they didn’t really service Volkswagens in Yugoslavia. We had to go to Greece to get the transmission, bring it back, and fix the car. The mechanic puts the transmission in, and it turns out we have four reverses and one forward, because he had put it in backwards. We ended up there for a week, and suddenly we all thought, “What are we doing? We are racing through these countries when we could really find out some new great information.” Every night we would be in the downtown or this main street in Gevgelija, where there was a promenade. People would come out, they would all walk down the street, they would go to the river and swim. We are thinking, “This is a really amazing place.” We barely got out of there because what we didn’t realize was that Yugoslavia had a seven-days-in-transit visa. There was a policeman who tried to stop us and make us pay as if we had stayed in a hotel; we had no money. We said, “We are going to Greece, it’s right there.” This little kid that we had befriended spoke English and the local language. He convinced the policeman that we were students and we were really nice people, and we shouldn’t have to pay this. We got out and finally made it to Greece. That was the first time for me that I understood what a lucky person I am to live in the United States. I had no idea what Yugoslavia was like. For three days I wouldn’t go to the bathroom because they only had those foot pads with a hole. There were wonderful things that we learned, like communities and how people really stayed with their families and all those kinds of European attitudes about family. Because my boyfriend was Italian, we ended up going to Sicily, where his family was from, and we met a couple of family members. They took us in and fed us wonderful food.

We took a lot of photographs, because our history teacher at Florida, Hal Kemp, said “Will you take slides for me?” We went to all these great places. I mean, we really wanted to go and see a lot of Europe, which we did. We were supposed to be going to Venice, and this is what we told our parents, “We’re going to Venice, and we’re going to do a study about water coming into Venice.” Even back then, it was coming in, right? Ricci and—I think—a woman that he worked with were doing these studies. We pretended that we were going there, but we actually went everywhere instead. We stayed in Italy a long time and traveled all over Italy. Then I said, “I want to go to Amsterdam. I want to go to France and London.” We didn’t go to Amsterdam, but we did travel back up north. This was in a bus, in which you could only go 30 miles an hour, even when we did get the new transmission. We got to France, and they were very suspicious of us because we were traveling in this bus. We had no money. The police knew that I was the only one that could speak French, so they questioned me for about an hour. “What are you doing? Why are you here? What are you doing with this bus and all this stuff?” I explained we were all architecture students. We were trying to visit everywhere. We went to Villa Savoye. Even back then, you could go, which was surprising to me. We went to the Unité d'Habitation; we did all those things that we could get to in France. I guess we took a ferry, because the Chunnel was not built yet, and we went to London. We went to St. James’s Square, where the diplomat project was.

IG: Did you meet with anybody while you were traveling?

LS: Let’s see. We had this professor who was from Manchester. We went up to Manchester, and we stayed there a couple of days and learned what a British industrial town it was. We didn’t meet a whole lot of other people. We didn’t really know a lot of people.

IG: This was the summer of 1970.

LS: Right.

IG: You went back to the University of Florida, and you still had one more year of classes. Did that trip influence the way you approached design in your last year?

LS: Yes, a lot. It made me realize so much that I didn't know and that we learned that summer. During our fifth year, we did what they called a “thesis.” I did something that was probably more planning related than building related, if I remember right. Larry Peterson came back, and this is what it was. We started looking at things related to the ecology of Florida. We realized it was such a fragile environment; I had never realized that. I thought Florida was boring. But when we got into this, we met this woman down in Fort Myers, and she was in Estero. Estero is kind of right next to Sanibel Island. It was a former communal utopia. These people believed that the world was flat, so it was a really crazy place. We got into this whole idea of the limits of growth. “What were the ecological factors in Florida that made a difference? Which places should grow and which should not?” I think it was my introduction to planning, which really affected me because then, in my graduate studies, I ended up doing a study on Lee County in Fort Myers.

Computers were just coming on to the campus then. You had to go put your punch cards in the queue for processing. It was just the beginning. Grant, Dick and I, because we had been friends all this time, bought a calculator together for $80. $80 was like $200 or so now or whatever. All it did was add, subtract, multiply, and divide. That was it. No square roots or any of that. That sort of took me into my kind of planning phase.

What happened was that in 1970, we came back, and we rented this house that was just outside the city limits of Gainesville. It was a house this guy had built on his property. His house was up here. It was probably like, I don’t know, ten acres or something like that; I don't know what he had. And this affected me a lot. The first night it was cold. Dick was living downstairs, and Grant’s cousin was there too. They slept downstairs, and Grant and I had a bedroom upstairs in this house. First cold night, Grant and Dick came home late, and we were already asleep. They turned on the furnace, and about an hour later I woke up and I said, “God, it’s kind of hot in here.” I went back to sleep, but then I woke up again, and I opened the door to the bedroom; flames were coming out of this closet, which was the furnace and the flue of the furnace. I said, “Grant, look, there’s a fire here!” We were college students who had concrete blocks as a bookshelf, and he picked up one of the concrete blocks and smashed the window. He asked me to jump, and I said, “No, I’m not going to jump. Tell Dick to go get the ladder.” There was a ladder because the guy was still working on something on the house. They get the ladder; we come down the ladder; and the house ultimately burns to the ground. We lost everything. We lost our copies of the slides we took in Europe. We lost all our projects, our books, everything. The fire trucks came, but there was no fire hydrant because the house was outside the city limits; firemen came with water on the truck. They would spray the water, and then the flames would come back up. I think there were three trucks in the end. We were homeless. We had no clothes. We had nothing. The school of architecture knew—we had been there for five years by this time—and they collected clothes for us. We all got some clothes. This woman who lived outside the city in a different direction from where we were, said that we could come and stay at her place. She had a trailer, which was a double trailer that was kind of cool. And then there was this little house, and she said we could come and stay at her Little House.” We said, “Okay, it’s a place to stay. We’ll go.”

IG: That was very generous.

LS: We are twenty miles outside the city, and we are going back and forth. I go home to my mom and dad and asked, “What do we do now?” My dad says, “I think I can get you some insurance,” which he did. He got me a couple thousand dollars. We all get back there and have to reconstruct everything. It was another amazing lesson though, because we realized we knew nothing about construction. This guy had put this flue through the wood floor. The first thing I learned the minute I started doing a house is that you’ve got to have a two-inch space between the flue and any combustible material. He didn’t have that. Of course, the first time we turned on the furnace, it turned to flames. We started realizing that in our materials and methods of construction classes all they did was teach you about the material, not about how to put them together.

IG: Not the assembly.

LS: Not the assembly. “Well, that was an interesting lesson.”

The woman’s name was Clifford Dwyer, a beautiful Southern wonderful woman. Her husband had been in World War II. I think he was one of the pilots of the bombers of Nagasaki or Hiroshima. He couldn’t deal with it and committed suicide. She was a widow and had two kids; she was the most generous, wonderful lady. She said, “If you want to build something out here, you can.” We found this guy who had been building geodesic domes. We said, “Let’s do that.” We built these domes. They were two domes connected by a sort of little straight piece in the middle. We covered them with polyurethane material. The windows were just like a thick plastic. It leaked like a sieve. It was horrible. I would wake up at night and go, “Oh my God, what’s going to get wet now?” Graduate school included building these domes, and all four of us lived there. Clifford had a lake that was a pure spring-fed lake. Our water just came straight from the lake; we weren’t thinking about sustainability then. The domes were not going to last. They were really cool when they were there, but they didn’t last. We tore the domes down, and that’s when I graduated in 1973, and I went to North Carolina, my first year of teaching there. Grant stayed in Florida, and he taught at University of Florida the first few years. I would come back in the summers. We tore down the domes and built a pole house. The pole house had a cistern; we took water from the lake, and we realized we couldn’t flush the toilets because there was no pump. There was not enough pressure from the cistern to make the toilets flush. We learned all these crazy things.

IG: You learned by doing it.

LS: Yeah. With the domes, we had to build the floors first. We found and collected this very old heart pine. The only way you could drive a nail into it was to drill it first, because it was rock hard. All that trigonometry that I loved, I learned because we were cutting pieces with double angles to put these pieces together. As bad as those domes were, boy, did we learn a lot about construction. Then we did the pole house, where we got real telephone poles, probably from the utility company. That was our structural frame, and then we built the walls and floors in between. I don’t know how long the pole house lasted because we left. Grant went to Florida A&M while I was still teaching at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

IG: You graduated from the undergraduate program in 1971, but you continued at the University of Florida to complete your graduate studies in 1973. Why did you decide to enroll in a graduate program right after undergrad?

LS: We got a five-year degree back then. That was our professional degree. We didn’t have to go to grad school. I wanted to go to grad school because I wanted to teach. Having worked in offices where I thought it was incredibly boring, I really didn’t want to work in an office. I was much more interested in continuing to learn on my own as I taught, which for me, I think was very important. I started realizing that I wasn’t just implementing what someone told me to do. I was trying to put together my own ideas and then made them make sense to my students. That’s why I wanted to teach. I was still in my period of really understanding architecture, even as I graduated. My work experience in Lakeland and then the one in Gainesville were all mundane jobs when you are just starting out, “Erase this or draw this over.” I wanted to be a better, clearer thinker about what I believed and what I wanted to do in architecture. I think it’s hard. You may get a different kind of education as a young person. I just had this sort of basic, “Here is your English. Here is your math. Here is your that.” It didn’t all come together for me until I was 21, 22, getting older and understanding that I had to put all this together and make it make sense in a building. That’s why I love Jack Hartray, because he helped me get that construction side. I think I had a bit of the theory side.

IG: It is interesting that you realized that you needed to continue to learn. By teaching other people, you could also learn about for yourself.

LS: Yes. You could verbalize your own thinking. I was catching up all the time. I think I was catching up.

IG: Did you apply to many universities to teach?

LS: Yes. I graduated in 1973, and I sent off all these applications or letters to different colleges. One was University of North Carolina at Charlotte. One was University of Nebraska. One was University of Manitoba. Manitoba sent me a letter back and said, “We will offer you $10,000 a year to come and teach.” They didn’t even meet me or anything. I got an offer from them, and I’m like, “Whoa.” But I decided I really didn’t want to go that far away. Nebraska was kind of cool, interesting, but it seemed a little bit too, I’m not sure what I call it, maybe all set in place. University of North Carolina at Charlotte was a brand-new school. They had been there maybe a couple of years. Dean Anderson was an interesting guy, and he was open. I thought, “I want to go there because they are inventing their program, and I want to help them invent it.”

IG: You became part of a group shaping the curriculum.

LS: Right. I didn’t realize it, but that’s what I really wanted to do. I wanted to teach what I thought it would be the right thing to teach kids. I was there for three years, and it was a really good experience. I liked Charlotte. It’s kind of an interesting city to live in.

IG: What did you teach?

LS: I taught mostly basic design. I didn’t do much building design then, but I taught all my students how to take photographs and tell a story with photography, which turned out to be a really cool project. Kids did some really neat stuff. I did one for myself. I took a whole bunch of slides of this place that made clay pots, just the basic planter pots with clay. You could see all the machines they used, how they took the raw materials, and how they came out in the end and everything. The kids did various things. We did all the stuff I had learned from Bernie: color theory, figure-ground, and all those things. Three years go by, and I’m making $10,500 a year. I’m scraping by. Even then, from 1973 to 1976, that was not a lot of money to live on. They hired this guy from the Boston Architectural Center [now Boston Architectural College]. He comes in with a five-year degree. I have a master’s degree. They pay him $12,000 a year. I was just like, “Why are you doing this, and why is that happening?” I said, “I think I’ll go back to Florida.” That’s when Grant and I were about to get married. I went back to Florida A&M, which is in Tallahassee; I didn’t have a job. I just said, “I’m going to go back there.” I don’t know what I was thinking. Actually, when I left there and came here [to Chicago], I didn’t have a job either. I just said, “I’m leaving. I’m not doing this anymore.” I went to Florida A&M, and I met the dean there. I guess they decided to hire me for a semester or something. Then, they decided, “We’ll keep you here.” I ended up there for four years.

There, I started teaching a building design class, some basic design classes, and a materials and methods of construction class. It was sort of broadening what I could do. At the same time, Grant and I were doing little projects for people, small houses. We were kind of designing, not really doing great construction documents or anything. We were doing that a little bit on the side.

I did that for four years, and we did a lot of fun stuff. There’s this picture of me with all these students and these big cardboard pieces that we made.

IG: I saw that. I thought that was great photograph.

LS: It was called Child Arc. What we were doing was we built these pieces. We took it to the town square of Tallahassee, and all these kids came and made things with them. We got a chance to do different projects than the normal everyday stuff. The good thing about A&M was it was a new school too. We were working with the other faculty saying, “What else do we need here? What else do we want?” The EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] at this time was working on integrating Black schools with white students and white schools with Black students. Florida A&M was a Black university, so they put the school of architecture there to encourage white students to enroll. We also had Black students as well. It was kind of an interesting new program. They didn’t have an architecture library. I said to the dean, “We need to get more books. What can we do?” He said, “Do you want to go up to the Avery Library [at Columbia University] and meet Adolf Placzek and talk to him about what we should buy? We’ve got all kinds of money.” So, I did. I went up and met Adolf. He was such a nice man, gave me a big list of the important architecture books. We put in our list to the library. It took them a couple of years to get all the books, but we built the architecture library. It was just like, “What do we need to do? Who can do that? Who can do this?” It was not just our classes, but to make this work as a department in the school.

IG: It is very interesting because you are not only teaching as part of the curriculum, but you are really shaping what it means to be an architecture school.

LS: Exactly. We had Martin Pawley. He did garbage architecture then. He would collect trash and make something out of it. He was from England. His wife [Philippa Morrison] became one of my good friends. He was doing these crazy kind of new things and experimental stuff. We had already built the domes and the pole houses and stuff. We were sort of doing our little experiments earlier. We loved Martin. He was kind of a neat guy. I loved those kinds of times where you get to be free to come up with things and do them, whatever they might be as a faculty member.

IG: You were there for four years until 1980. What was the next step?

LS: I realized I was not marrying Grant, and I was not going to stay with him. I realized too that I had been teaching for seven years and I wasn’t a real architect. The other thing that happened was we were studying for the exam. Grant passed. I failed. It made me realize I wasn’t doing what I should be doing. Grant is not helping me because he got another girlfriend, even though we are living together; this is just not what I should be doing. I should not stay here. I didn’t like tenure. I didn’t like the whole idea of it because I thought those faculty members, old guys who were tenured at University of Florida, didn’t think; they didn’t learn. They just did their job, and that was it. I was realizing, “I don’t want to be like that. If I’m going to teach, I want to teach because I like what I’m doing, not because I’m a tenured professor.” I broke up with Grant for good and said, “I’m out of here. I’ve done enough teaching. I need to go and be working in a good office where I can learn how to put buildings together, and then I’ll be a better teacher.” I sold the house. I sold my car. I moved to Chicago. Both of my sisters were here. That’s one reason I came here.

IG: What made you decide to go to Chicago?

LS: It was between Chicago and Boston. I went and interviewed in Boston. I went to Cambridge Seven and a couple of firms there that I really wanted to work for, but they didn’t have any jobs. I came here without a job, and I just said, “I’ll just get a job. I know I can get one somehow.” My dad thought I was crazy, my conservative dad. I don’t know what my mom thought, but anyway, I was breaking up with Grant. They were probably happy about that. After a while, they were like, “Why is she still with him?”

What happened was, I said, “I’ll stay at Florida A&M until we get accredited.” That’s kind of an important thing to not leave before all that has been worked out. Jack Hartray was on the accreditation team, and I told Jack when he was there, I said, “I’m thinking about moving to Chicago.” He said, “When you get to Chicago, call me up, and I’ll take you to lunch.” So, I did. I called him. I had put a portfolio together of drawings of projects that I’d done on my own. I didn’t have many student projects in there, just mostly work of mine. I went to Jack’s office [Nagle Hartray & Associates], and he says, “We’re having an office lunch today, so why don’t you join us for that?” There is probably a table a little bigger than this one with people from the office. I think it was probably 15 or 20 people, somewhere in there.

IG: That was the size of the office.

LS: Yeah. They had an office lunch. I don’t remember what the topic was at all. I think a couple people said to Jack, and more Jack than Jim [Nagle], “Let’s hire her.” Jack says to me, though, “We don’t have any jobs right now, but I’ll give you some names of people to call.” I went and met with Tom Beeby; I met with Rick Solomon; somebody at Helmut Jahn’s office. I didn’t want to work at SOM, so I didn’t even try. I met a few others, which was really nice. They knew I had been teaching and all that.

IG: Were you interested in smaller offices rather than the big offices?

LS: Yes. Yes. The rumor about a Skidmore kind of office was, well, if you get working at Skidmore as a beginning architect, all you’re going to do is draw bathrooms for a whole year. I didn’t want to do that. A week later, Jack’s office called me back. I think it was their office manager. She says, “Jack says he wants you to come back in. They might have a job for you.” I came back in and they had just gotten the dormitories at Northwestern. I ended up working with one guy in particular, Tom Pozchak—a really nice guy—and a few other people. I sort of made my way through understanding how they put their drawings together, ink on Mylar back then, and all the little details that we had to do; I enjoyed it. It was really, really good experience for me because this was kind of my PhD of learning about putting a building together. I didn’t always agree with Jim Nagle’s idea of what design was about. He was kind of one of those Dutch modernist believers. Most of his façades were perfectly flat. I don’t really like flat façades. I like things that have elements like shading or interest in the way they move back and forth.

IG: There is more articulation in the façade.

LS: Exactly. I knew that that wasn’t Jim, and he was mostly the design leader in the firm, because Booth, Nagle, and Hartray had just split up. Booth had just gone off to start his own firm. But it was a really good experience for me. The other thing that happened was they had one woman in their office. She wasn’t really an architect, but they got her to do a lot of the interiors work with some of the clients. They would do the house or whatever it might be, but they did a lot of houses then too. She would help the client find the right pieces of furniture. I had never learned much about interiors at all. I came in, and they decided to give me that job, and I was like, “Well, I’ve never really learned about this.” I was a little bit resentful because I knew they were doing it because I was a woman. But, at the same time, I never knew Florence Knoll. I never knew Charles Eames and what they did as furniture designers, and I loved lighting back then too. I’d get all the lighting catalogs going. “What if we use this one?” I got that experience while I was there, and I realized I could at least do a house; I could do a building; and then I could also offer a client the idea that we could do their interiors if they wanted the furnishings. We considered architecture everything that was attached to the walls, meaning the lights and the colors of the walls or whatever else came with it. That was what we called “architecture.” The furniture was “interiors” for us.

IG: Was there a variety of building typologies in the firm?

LS: Yes, that was a good part of it. I looked back on it and I went, “I should have maybe gone to Skidmore, where I could do a really big project, understand a really tall building or something.” But they [Nagle Hartray & Associates] did the dormitories. They did various sorts of mid-size projects. They didn’t do much over an eight-story building that I remember. Maybe later they did. They did some houses. They had a client, Paul Lurie, who really loved architecture, and they had done his house. Paul came back and wanted to do his daughter’s bedroom furniture. We decided it should be built in. I got the assignment of doing her furniture, which I did with this kind of painted but curvy pieces of furniture stuff. It took me a month or more to draw this, and they loved it. Paul just loved that furniture, and his daughter did too. This was really fun. I really enjoyed this. I loved getting down to that level of detail, because then I was detailing how to put it together on top of that. Paul didn’t even know I was an architect. He thought I was just like the woman who had done this before in the firm. He goes, “Oh, you’re actually an architect?” I was, “Yes, I am.” It was very funny because the way they would introduce you at the firm was sort of, “Here is Linda. She’s going to work on this for you.”

IG: No credentials.

LS: No credentials, no. It was an interesting experience to work with them. Then I decided I kind of wanted to teach again, and UIC was offering Howard Decker, who was at Nagle at that time, a job teaching a design class. They had talked to me and asked me if I would want to do one, because I think Rick Solomon was somehow connected to UIC. I can’t remember exactly how all that went. I went and talked to Jack, and I said, “UIC is offering me a teaching job. Could I do that?” And Jack said, “No, I think we really need you to stay here full time.” I was kind of angry about that because they let Howard do it, but not me. I ended up going to UW-M [University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture & Urban Planning]. I think that’s when I left Nagle, and I met Kathy Quinn.

IG: What year would that have been?

LS: I left September of 1985. I met Kathy Quinn, and she was deciding to leave Tom Beeby’s office almost at the same time. It was funny that we met in Marshall Fields in the winter; I wanted to buy one of those earmuffs. It was so cold. I see Kathy and I went, “Hi, Kathy. How are you?” Sabra White, who worked at the Chicago Historical Society, had told me that Kathy was leaving Tom’s office. I was inkling in my mind going, “I really think I want to leave.” Sabra had said to me, “Why don’t you talk to Kathy Quinn? Maybe you could be a partner with her.” I thought, “There’s an idea.” I see Kathy and I go, “Sabra White said this.” And Kathy goes, “That would be great!” I was surprised that she was so excited about it. We had done these Chicago Women in Architecture exhibits during this time period. We both knew Sabra. I said, “What do you think?” She goes, “Let’s talk about it.” We ended up meeting and talking a little bit, and she said, “I’m going to work in Bill McBride’s office for a few months until I find a place to rent for my own office.” She said, “We can work there and see how it works out and then decide if we want to form a partnership.” That’s how we did it.

I left Nagle’s office. I had no money. I had a couple thousand dollars, and I was getting some income from the house in Tallahassee. It kind of got me through this period of low salary from Nagle Hartray, not working or teaching yet at UW-M, which I did, I think, in January. Kathy and I paid ourselves $500 each over that year. That was it. We just knew that we were going to do this, but we knew we were not going to pay ourselves. We just had to keep it together.

IG: Did any of you two have any clients?

LS: I had none. At least I thought I had none. Then Jack Hedrick and his wife asked me to do something at their house in Wilmette, in the northern suburbs. Kathy had done Bannockburn Green Shopping Center. She ended up getting some work from that developer. That was all we had in the beginning. We just were saying, “Let’s see what happens.” We did it. I look back at it, and I would never do that now.

IG: It’s always great not to know too much because otherwise, you wouldn’t do it.

LS: Exactly. You start out stupid because otherwise you would never do it. That’s kind of how it was.

IG: Did you ever discuss your roles in the office? What was your role?

LS: This is a good question because we both wanted the same role. And this is why it didn’t work. I’ve told people this before that we both really wanted to be designers. We didn’t want to have to do a lot of the management, accounting, that kind of stuff. But we both knew we needed to know certain things, or we weren’t going to make it at all. For instance, we had a woman who came in, and she would do our accounting, and I had never even looked at a balance sheet or a profit-loss statement before in my life. She gives us these pieces of paper with these numbers on it, and I go, “I don’t know what this means.” I went back to Jack Hartray and I said, “Jack, I can’t tell if we are making money or not. I don’t know how much we should be using for a billing rate. How do you figure these things out?” He told me, “What you say is, it’s one-third the billing; it’s one-third what you need for the office and overhead; one-third profit.” Of course, that’s very ideal, that profit part.

IG: You bill three times.

LS: It was really two and a half times when we started. Two and a half times. We thought we should bill, I think it was like $60 an hour or whatever it was then. It was very low. Then Jack said, “Here is how you look at the profit-loss statement.” Slowly over time, it started making sense to me. “We just have to make it at least break even. If we can pay ourselves and break even, we’re pretty good. We might have a little extra in the end and keep that in the bank or something.” We bought our first computer together. I mean, it was so crazy. That was just a computer for accounting. It was not for drawing.

IG: Not for design.

LS: No, not for design. Not in 1986.

IG: Where was the office located?

LS: Around the corner from Bill [McBride]. Bill’s office was at the corner of Illinois and Wells. We went right around the corner onto Hubbard. There used to be a home store that was kind of a cool modern home store on the first floor of that building. There were three loft spaces above it, pretty small spaces. We rented the third floor, and we put in little workstations. I think there were four, a little front desk, and a conference room.

IG: Did you have any employees?

LS: Not in the beginning. Then we got our first employee. Kathy knew this young woman named Polly Crocker. She’s still around too. Then I had a student whose name was Jihad, and he was Iranian, I think. He came and worked part-time with us for a while. Slowly, we got a couple more people. We got a bigger office on Ontario. Bill Brockschmidt was one of them. This is over this five-year period because we started in, I call it late 1985 and went through 1990. In that period of time, in 1987, I got married to Joe. We realized—this is part of your question about roles—that we really both wanted to do the same thing. I wrote this little two-page typewritten piece about why I didn’t like to compete with women. It was when I was starting to play golf, and I was wondering, “Why? Why does this bother me? I don’t like competition.” First of all, I never had any competition in athletics because we didn’t have Title IX. We had no high school sports at all for women. Maybe there was a tennis team or something, but it was crazy what we didn’t have sports, especially in the South, I think, more than the North; there was no women’s golf team. There was no nothing. Being a cheerleader was the only thing you could do that was even sports related at all.

My best friend had told me that my mother competed with me, and then I started thinking about this whole thing. I wrote this piece, and I realized that Kathy and I were basically competing with each other. She had more experience in an office than I did, so I was kind of relying on her in the beginning to be the leader. But we were supposed to be equal, and I’m getting this whole idea and what we should do. But she’s not letting me be equal. That’s when we started falling apart, because she didn’t want me to be equal. It was very sad. It was for me more like a divorce than anything I’d ever had with any male, because I really thought we failed, because here we were, two women architects, and there weren’t many. There was one other office with two women as partners, Gigi McCabe. But her partner died of breast cancer, and then she went into some other kind of things like working for the city. She worked for the city for a while. For me, with Kathy, I really didn’t want it to happen that we weren’t going to make this and be successful together. It was very disappointing. We had been hired by Walsh Higgins’s development company, Walsh Higgins, to start working on a project with them. Kathy just wanted to take it over and do it all. I was working 60 hours a week, teaching, and then busting our butts. We were through this early period. Through many years later too. But Joe was convincing me that I was good at what I was doing, which it was taking me all this time to sort of feel like, “Maybe I am able to do this. Maybe I am okay, and maybe I’m good.” I never felt like a star through college. I mean, I felt like, “I’m up there. I’m not failing. I’m not the C group over here. I’m in the B group.” But I was not a superstar. I still didn’t have that confidence. I was getting that confidence with Kathy, with our firm, and we got Matt Walsh. Matt hired us to do this little gazebo for him and his wife. Kathy said, “Why don’t you do that, Linda?” I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” We ended up getting a Divine Detail Award from AIA Chicago for the gazebo. Matt was great because he knew construction and he had a great carpenter. We, but mostly me, had drawn pretty good details of how it should get built. This carpenter was a fantastic guy, and he just built it. I would come out and we would talk about how we should do this or that. Then Joe brought a project to us, which was the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee. This company was buying old theaters and figuring out how to make them profitable by subdividing them into smaller theaters. This one had these cool, beautiful decorations and everything that we wanted to keep. Joe brought that in. Of course, I did that because my husband had given it to us as a project.

IG: What type of projects did you have in the office at that time?

LS: The Walsh Higgins project was kind of a pretty big one, which was a development in Burr Ridge. Ultimately, I ended up keeping that project. The master plan was done by, I think, Lohan’s office, which was kind of ordinary, A master plan with little circles and a semicircle at the end. That was one of the reasons that we ended up kind of splitting up. She and I actually even went to a therapist together.

IG: It really was like a divorce.

LS: It really was. We were trying to save it, but in the end, Kathy just didn’t want to save it. But the therapist analyzed us both. Kathy’s father had died when she was about five years old. He said she has always known that she had to pull herself up by her bootstraps. Those were his words. And that she would just do it, take care of things by herself. I can’t even remember what he said about me. I don’t know. You always remember the other person, not yourself. Right? In the end, I think she was not happy that Joe was influencing me and saying, “You can do this. You are good at what you are doing.” She probably, in the end, was jealous of the fact that he and I had gotten married. I don’t know all that emotion that was going between us anymore, except that I was very sad that it didn’t work out, that, in my mind, we had failed.

IG: There couldn’t have been many partnerships where both founders were women. Sometimes it’s a husband-and-wife team, but two women leading an office was probably very unusual.

LS: It was. There were no other women partners in Chicago back then. People were like, “This is great. Two women, we are so happy.” It was kind of like the architecture world knew we couldn’t do it. I talked to Cindy Weese a lot, even when I was at Nagle Hartray, because their office was one floor below ours. Jack would say, “You should go talk to Cindy, she’s really nice and she’ll help you.” After Kathy and I broke up, I said to Cindy, “I don’t know what to do. Should I try? Should Joe and I be partners or not?” She said, “Why don’t you be the first couple in Chicago who doesn’t become partners?” And I went, “You know what? You are right.” It’s a good thing because I think Joe and I would have been divorced. But because we had separate firms, we really could dialogue with each other. It has helped both of us do what we did. Not to be partners. It worked well.

Kathy and I had some interesting projects, and that was the other thing. We got a house out in St. Charles, Willard Residence. Somehow this guy called me, but then Kathy did the house, and it was kind of lucky what we got in the first place. Who actually worked on it was almost random. At the end of the day, we would just be having these conversations about our relationships, about whoever we were dating or something else in our lives. It was very personal at the end of the day. She was very good for me because I was very introverted, and I didn’t know how to even ask people questions like, “How are you?” Or “What’s your life like?” I just didn’t know how to do that. She knew how to do it really well, and I learned that from her, which helped me a lot. I knew I always wanted to understand what we were doing for the person and who that person was, and that has always been really important to me. I need to understand what you do. What do you do when you get up in the morning? What do you do first thing? Do you go to make your coffee? We had this questionnaire that we asked clients when they would come in and work with us that we used a lot.

We also had what we call the red book, which I think firms used to have on paper. It was, “Here’s your checklist for what you need to do when you start doing your construction documents. Don’t forget. Be sure you put in the smoke detector over here.” That kind of stuff. We would just keep it all in one place. I would get, in my new office, young architects out of school, and I realized as it went on a little bit, that they would be with me for a few years, but then go on and go to a bigger firm or go somewhere else. But this was their learning ground in a way, and I have always been a natural teacher. It was just like I wanted them to have that knowledge in the first place. If they had to go on, well, okay, they had to go on. But it was hard for me to let people go too, because they were just getting really good at what they were doing.

IG: I want to pause in that moment of 1990 when you opened your own office. It sounds like the partnership that you had before with Kathy Quinn was crucial to have the confidence to open Searl and Associates. You probably wouldn’t have opened your own office straight from Nagle Hartray. You didn’t know enough.

LS: No. I could not have done that.

IG: It sounds like that was heartbreaking in a certain aspect, but also very important to get you to the other point.

LS: Very important.

IG: At that point, you had been ten years in Chicago. I’m curious about your relationship to the architectural community in Chicago. You mentioned your involvement with the Chicago Women in Architecture. I’m curious about your involvement outside of the office.

LS: As soon as I got here, Cindy said, “You need to join Chicago Women in Architecture.” And so I did. I had been in places everywhere before Chicago, and very few women were there. In school, in teaching, even then, there would be maybe one other woman faculty member, and then everybody else was male. I was in this little bubble of, “I’m just one of a kind. All these other people around me are men.” That was my life, my school, everything. I got here and then I joined CWA. I was realizing, “Wow, there are lots of women here.” It was great, because I finally realized that, “Hey, we are still a minority in this field, but here we have a group of people where we can talk to each other. We can learn from each other. And we can even do an exhibition,” which we did. When I joined CWA, everybody had a lot of energy. We wanted to do stuff. We had two exhibits within the five years of me being at Nagle Hartray, maybe the other exhibit was when Kathy and I started the firm or something. The reason I met her was because she had done a project for that exhibit also. Getting that network of women for me was eye-opening. I thought, “There are more of us here than I realized, and what we need to do is make sure we get more women in this field. Otherwise, it’ll always be the same.” What I think women have done for architecture in general is they have humanized it a whole lot more. That has really been important. One of my real heroes is Eileen Gray, whose [E-1027] house is amazing. We just went there three or four years ago. It’s amazing.

IG: Hers is also a hard story.

LS: Really hard story. I didn’t even know that story until we went there and they told us all about the boyfriend and the drugs and all that horrible stuff that happened. But anyway, this opened my world here to realize, “Hey, it’s not such a small, tiny world for us. We have power. We have great women who are doing great things.” Cynthia was coming up when I first got here, and Gertrude Kerbis was well-known. In fact, I went and I tried to get a job with Gertrude, but I forget what she said. It was something funny. It wasn’t like, “No, I don’t have a job for you.” It was something like, “Go out there and find the right job or something.” It was completely different. It did change my life, I think a lot. Especially, just to move to Chicago, be in a place where architecture was completely appreciated, which it was not in Florida. The only place in Florida that even had a decent office was Miami. It was Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany [Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company]. They were just getting started back then too, and it was very postmodern kind of stuff. I was like, “I’m not going to Miami. I’m going to a big city.” It really helped me.

I joined CWA. I became a president in 1984, and I wanted to make that group grow. When Kathy and I became partners, I needed to get involved with AIA. I didn’t know how to run an office, what the procedures that you needed were. AIA was somewhat of a source for that kind of information. I needed to be a more active member of AIA. Then, there was the Design Committee of AIA Chicago, and Pete Landon was in that. That’s how I met a bunch of other people who were dedicated to what they did, to what they could do for the city, and to what they could do for AIA. I met Joe before that, but somehow, he was also in the Design Committee later on.

When we were on the Design Committee back then, which was say the ’90s, we wanted to get different awards going. That’s how we got the Divine Detail Award, with our committee, because it’s not just about a finished building. Let’s get some other ideas going. AIA then led me into getting on the AIA Board, and I was president of AIA in 1993. Cindy was on the National AIA Board about the same time. She was going to be vice president and would have been president elect, but then Wash U asked her to be the Dean, so she resigned her vice president position. She and I were always talking and saying, “We’ve got to get more women on the board in general, whether it’s national or local.” AIA National had its convention here in 1993, and I met Susan Maxman, who was then president of AIA National, and Margaret McCurry, who was chair of the AIA National Design Committee; we had all these women that were running things. I got into the idea that, maybe being on the national board is important for making AIA National a better place, because it was very male-oriented. I mean, Chicago was nothing like that. People in Chicago were so nice. There are some self-aggrandizing people. There are some of those, but most principals of firms are amazingly nice. In New York, not so much. All AIA National Board thought about was what was bothering them, not so much what was going on in the world. I get on that board, and then Alice Sinkevitch, then AIA executive director, calls me and says, “Linda, I just want to let you know that you are on a long list of possible members to be added to the Chicago Plan Commission.” I said, “Oh, that’s nice. It is nice to know I’m on.” Chris Hill, who is an architect, worked in the planning department and he wanted an architect on the Plan Commission because there were none. They were attorneys; they were developers; they were, like, all the ones who were so self-interested.

IG: The ones who make the deals.

LS: Exactly. I said, “That would be interesting. A couple months later, I forget who called me—maybe it was Chris Hill—and he said, “Linda, we’d like to get you on the Plan Commission. And I said, “I have no idea what it’s about exactly, but sure, I’ll do that. It sounds interesting. What can I learn by doing that?”

IG: What year might that have been?

LS: It was 1997. Joe and I had built our house in the meantime.

IG: By that time, you already had seven years of your own practice.

LS: Exactly. We had moved over to LaSalle Street. Joe had joined DeWalt Train. They moved to 200 North LaSalle Street, and there was a little bit of space left over on that floor. Joe and I had shared space at 900 North Franklin all these years in separate parts of the same space, but still separated, never together. My office moved over to 200 North LaSalle, which was perfect for where City Hall is located. I got on the Plan Commission, and then I said, “Would you mind if I come and see the projects ahead of time? First of all, my vision is not really great. Looking at boards that are way over there, I really can’t see them. Then, I’ll have better comments in the meetings.” I would go over to the planning department and see things. Then they started coming to me and saying, “Linda, we’d really like you to look at this project and tell us what you think. We’re not sure we really like everything about it. What would you say?” We started having those dialogues between the planning department and me, and what we could do to make things better and improve them. What I learned over all those years was the best you can do is make something that’s pretty bad, sort of mediocre. You could never make it great.

IG: I was going to ask about how much influence those comments had in shaping a building.

LS: A little. But again, I think they knew I was coming after a while, and I’d say, “Why are you putting that there?” What I learned was that you couldn’t talk about specific little things in design, because as [42^nd Ward Alderman] Burt Natarus would tell us, the Plan Commission is concerned about zoning. He said, “It’s not about design, it’s about zoning.” I thought of what I could talk about that was planning related; that had to do with how people see the city from the sidewalk; what was important in urban planning that we could influence and make better; and what the city did and the department did. They were planners; I was their architect. We would start talking about what could happen at the ground level. “We want Walgreens to not have everything closed off, where you can’t see a thing inside. What do we do with these big boxes?” Then, Alicia Berg came on as Planning Commissioner, and she formed this group because we realized it couldn’t just be me and maybe one other person looking at a project, making our critiques. Mayor [Richard M.] Daley kind of let us do it, but it was not like what Maurice [Cox] did later, where it was more official. We were the mayor’s advisory group. It included John Syvertsen and Phil Enquist, planner from SOM. For a while, we had Mark Sexton and a few others, and we’d all get together and we’d look at projects together. Alicia was really good at this. She could get the dialogue going, and then we could come together as sort of a committee. Every once in a while, we would actually meet with the architect who was doing the project as a group. Sometimes we could convince somebody, “This is really crappy, or you got to do better.” And they would. A couple of people told us, like Brininstool + Lynch would say, “Linda, thank you for doing this, because we can’t do anything unless the developer hears it from somebody besides us.” They wanted to do better, but the developer wasn’t letting them do something better.

IG: That was smart, because they introduced someone between the architect and the developer. That mediator actually helped to improve the project.

LS: Exactly. I started saying, “Wait a minute, what’s the developer giving us? What are they doing for us and the city? Not us, me, but the City of Chicago. Let’s make the city better, and how are they doing that?” There is where my mom comes in. I was saying “You got to give back. You can’t just take it all for yourself and make all this money.” I think we did help and influence at least a few things that got better.

IG: How long did that advisory group last?

LS: When Alicia left [in 2004], it was gone. It was probably five years [2001–2004]. She was great. I wish she had stayed, but something happened between her and the mayor.

IG: How long were you in the Plan Commission?

LS: I was on the Plan Commission until about four or five years ago. So, twenty-five years.

IG: That is a long time.

LS: Yeah.

IG: Let’s go back to your practice. You opened your practice in 1990. You had the experience of having been in a partnership for four years and had done some important work. I’m curious to know your goals for your own practice, what you were interested in pursuing in terms of projects, and how you wanted to set up the office. It is the first time that you were on your own.

LS: Here is what I forgot to tell you. The last project that Kathy and I did together was a house for Penny Pritzker and Bryan Traubert. What came out of that was that “these two women know how to do high-end residential projects.” That was the reputation that came along with this. Michael Searle had heard that Kathy and I had done Penny’s house, and he was deciding he was going to build a new house. I’d call Michael a little bit of a difficult person, but interesting. He had a very nice art collection, even as a young person. His father had bought one of the Degas [“Landscape With Smokestacks”] that they discovered had been stolen from Nazi Germany. That’s a good story. There is a book called The Orpheus Clock, [by Simon Goodman] and that story is in there. If you ever get a chance to read it, it’s really good.

Michael came and talked to me and decided that he would hire our firm; it was me and Bill Brockschmidt. Bill was really good; he’s the one I wanted to take with me. We finished Penny and Brian's house maybe in 1988 or ’89. And then Walsh Higgins came in with that project, but it didn’t come to fruition as I remember it. We were kind of getting slow in work. Then she [Kathy] decided she didn’t want to be partners anymore. We were just four people in the office, so I took Bill, she took the other person, Polly, and we split up the jobs. I took the Walsh jobs because I had already done the gazebo, and I really liked Matt and his wife Joyce. I ended up doing quite a few projects more for Matt and Joyce. It was just Bill and I, and I think I ended up hiring one more person, Cynthia de Hoyos. We got Michael Searle’s house, and he had just married Nydia, and he had a great art collection. I said, “Michael, one thing I want to do is I want to draw every piece of art on the walls of your house once we get the house designed.” We did that; it was really fun. He had this collection of three-dimensional pieces; maybe they were Indian pottery. I said, “Why don’t we put a glass box through the center of the stair and then we could put these pieces in the stair?” We did that. The house was designed partly around the art and partly around their lifestyle. They had a very formal living room, and then they had more casual rooms in the back of the house. It was one of those narrow lots on Cleveland or Fremont or one of those streets up in West Lincoln Park. That then formed this idea even further that our firm was pretty good at high-end residential projects.

IG: Was that something that you were chasing consciously or was that a result of the work that you had been doing?

LS: Results. Completely results. Then, there were times when I would talk to Joe and I would say, “If I have to do another kitchen, I’m going to quit.” It was funny, because I kind of like doing kitchens, but I mean, there is this point where you are going, “I can’t just do this over and over. I’m not going to do it.”

We moved to North LaSalle, and Joe and I interviewed together for this project at U.S. Robotics. I worked a little bit on this project that was really for the Valerio Dewalt Train office, but this company was kind of cool. They made modems. They were part of the beginning of this new technology. Joe ended up doing two or three more projects for them. Casey Cowell was the CEO of U.S. Robotics. He had had two other partners, one of them passed away, and then one of them decided he wasn’t going to stay there. Casey was the sole CEO and owner of U.S. Robotics. Casey calls Joe one day and says, “Hey, Joe, I’m doing a house in Michigan. Do you do houses?” Joe was at this point where he is saying, “Our firm isn’t going to do any residential work anymore, but you might want to meet my wife, Linda.” Casey goes, “Have her send me her resume, I want only pictures. No words.” Joe comes in, “Put this together, just put pictures, no words.” I’m like, “I can do that, I don’t really like words that much anyway.” I go and I meet Casey, and by this time, it’s not about the house; it’s about a condo that he had bought at Water Tower Place. He said, “Your work is really beautiful.” And he says, “I just bought this condo.” It turns out he decides to buy a bigger one at Water Tower. In the meantime, he has decided to hire our firm. It was a cool little space. Well, it’s three bedrooms, nice big living room, but it was horrible inside; it was horrible. It had this red clay tile floor. I am like, “This is horrible, I can’t stand this place.” He couldn’t either. He just wanted to gut it; he wanted to start over. That was my first project with Casey, who then became a client I have had for twenty years. Joe is next door; we’re still at 200 North LaSalle. Because Casey is his client for the U.S. Robotics work, Joe wants to make sure that nothing is getting messed up in my office. He comes over every other day, “How is it going over there with Casey’s condo?” I go, “It’s going fine. It’s getting built.” Casey says, “I want it done in three months.” We get it done in four months; not too bad, considering we are gutting the whole place, putting in all new cabinets, all new kitchen, everything.

IG: Was that your first high-rise project?

LS: Yeah, the first project in a high-rise. Joe comes over and he’s going, “How are you doing?” and I’d be like, “Get the fuck out of my office.” I said, “It’s going fine. Leave me alone.” Joe tells that story a lot, this is the only reason I remember it. By this time, Bill has left with a guy from Stanley [Tigerman]’s office, I can’t remember his name. Bill was married to this wonderful lady; because he was born and raised in Virginia, he could never reveal the fact that he was gay. Then, suddenly they get a divorce, and he has to reveal what is going on. I’m like, “Bill, I don’t care. I like you. That doesn’t bother me a bit.” But he decided that he and the guy that ended up being his husband, [Richard Dragisic], didn’t want to stay in Chicago, and they moved to New York, and they started their own firm there. He really loved doing more classical work, and I was trying to get more and more modern as I went. It was a good time for him to go anyway. Then, I hired a couple of other people. Patrick Maguire, who had been a student of mine from UW-M, started working for me. Then, I hired Pam [Lamaster], who is now an owner here. I saw her work and I went, “This girl has a really good imagination. I think she’s going to be a good architect.” She was just about a year out of school.

IG: The two hires were fairly young then.

LS: Yes. Greg [Howe] had gone to school at U of I, in economics first, and then decided he wanted to be an architect. He went back to school. In the meantime, between summers of going to U of I, he worked in Loebl Schlossman & Hackl’s office in their marketing department. He learned about what they did, the brochures they put together, and stuff. He is a very good designer, but he has also been a very good marketer. They are a great pair because they complement one another. Pam’s father was a contractor, and so she gets the construction side. Greg is not bad at that either, but they were so good for each other. By the time we got to LaSalle Street, I had six or eight people in the office.

IG: That’s a fairly sizable office. What other projects did you have in the office?

LS: Yeah. We had the Water Tower condo. We had Michael Searle’s house, that I think started when we were on Franklin and went over to LaSalle. That went on for probably a couple of years, at least. We did Casey’s apartment, and Joe had been working with this woman from Milwaukee, Nancy Willart, and she was an interior designer. She did a lot of interiors with Joe. Casey calls me up during the middle of this project, and he says, “I think I want to move in, and I want it turnkey,” and I am going, “What’s turnkey?” I knew what it was, but it just wasn’t making sense with him. We had started doing the interiors. He had already told us to go ahead and buy the furniture. I tried to take him to the Mart one day and he goes, “I never want to come back here again.”

IG: It can be overwhelming.

LS: I had a meeting with him one time on this, or maybe the next project, and I brought all the fabrics and colors and everything. I said, “What do you think?” He says, “I like it all.” It was a five-minute meeting. I mean, it was so funny because he cared. He did want good design, but he was not going to get down into the like, “I don’t like that one.” That is how he was, he was really good as a client.

Then Nancy came along, and we got her to help us with the interiors, because I didn’t feel that confident that I knew that much. She then started making us realize that we could do this too. We could do the architecture, and we could do everything else. Casey had this woman, Beth Ann, his office assistant, who I think still works for him, who was his admin at U.S. Robotics. He says, “Beth Ann, you go with Linda and just get everything I need.” She and I went to Marshall Field’s, or maybe it was Macy’s already then, and Williams Sonoma, and we bought the sheets, the towels, the dishes, the silverware; everything. Beth Ann and I spent $5,000 in one hour at Williams Sonoma. I’m like, “Wow, this is an interesting experience.” The way my mom and I related to one another was by shopping. I have always liked to do little shopping here and there. I was realizing, “This is really fun. No one is going to sue me for buying them the wrong pots and pans.”

IG: Did you always design the interiors for projects for which you had done the architecture, or did you get clients that only wanted the interiors done?

LS: We always did them for projects for which we were doing the architecture. Now we have Bethany [Grachan], and I think she has some of her own projects, but very few. Mostly she works on what we are doing here in the office. We have almost always, since those early days, had someone in the office who mostly did interiors work for us. Then I had a partnership with Ann Blossfeld, and they were the interiors firm, but the recession came along and we couldn’t keep it going. Ann was very mad at me, but I said, “Ann, I can’t do it. You need to be paid, and we need to pay for your rent and all this; we are not getting any money in. I can’t do it.” It was very hard for me to do. Since then, we have had Bethany as an employee rather than as a separate firm.

IG: I see. Can you walk me through your design process and your process with the client? Earlier you mentioned a questionnaire that you used to know more about the client: how they lived, what they wanted. Did you work through drawings or models?

LS: Models.

IG: Walk me a little bit through that process.

LS: We would have good two- or three-hour meetings with a client. At first, we didn’t want people bringing in their own pictures. I was like, “Don’t show us something just because you think that’s what you want.” We tried to explain to our clients, first of all, that what we wanted to hear from them was how they lived. We would say, “What do you do in the morning? Do you entertain? And if you have parties, how many people do you have? How many people do you want at your dining room table? Do you have a library? Do you want to have a place for all books?” All those really detailed little questions that we could get. I look at our library here, and Joe and I had a bunch of books at the house in Ukrainian Village.

We would just ask our clients, “Do you cook together in your kitchen? How many people do you cook for?” All those kinds of details that we wanted to know. And I was always really interested in how they related to the outside, whether the client was interested or not. “What did you want to do? Did you want to have a place that you could either look out or walk out or relate to the exterior of your house?” We would go through that, probably in one meeting, and we always wrote up the notes whenever they told us; we would keep really detailed meeting notes on every meeting we had with our client. Then, we would say, “What we are going to do is we are going to come up with a few different schemes about how we might solve the way you live and how this might work on this site, and what we want to do.” Pretty typical stuff. We would try to come up with at least three different ideas of what they wanted or what we thought they wanted. Sometimes we would find out that they said they wanted this, but they didn’t really want this. We would go through just planning it, just trying to make it work planning wise. We wouldn’t worry yet about materials or other more complicated issues, structure or stuff like that. We kind of kept it at the planning level. Now we do some stuff where we pin up imagery. There are three different plans right there with images for a place that we did that was the old bowling alley [Willow Residence]. For that project, we did three schemes, and it was like where the stair would be. I really liked the one where the stair was on the outside wall, and it was visually interesting. But she wanted the one that was inside. A lot of times we would do study models back then too, because we didn’t have 3D modeling. We would do options: “Well, here is what this stair would look like, that stair would look like,” just even parts of it. That way we would, first of all for ourselves, decide which ones we liked, and then we would see which ones the clients thought they liked. Then we would try to find images that we thought made some sense for what the project might be.

IG: To communicate the experiential qualities?

LS: Yeah. Not necessarily because “I like that piece of wood” or something. We spend a lot of time with them. We don’t just say, “You want a four-bedroom, three-bath house. Okay. Here are some ideas.” In fact, back to the Burr Ridge project, what happened was Walsh Higgins had us design some prototypes of different sizes and different places for the houses that would go in there. There are two parts of that Burr Ridge project. One is they just let the developers go crazy with these big McMansions, which are horrible. And then it’s our kind of modest houses. I wouldn’t say they were great designs, but they were great plans. They worked together as a group, and we kept a record of each one as it got built. One client sued the contractor, which was Walsh Construction, Walsh Higgins, and me, because, as we found out later, they had put a bathroom over the garage, which wasn’t even in the permit plans. They went to Florida in the winter, and it froze, and half the house was underwater. There is this big lawsuit. I go, “We’ve been keeping every permit as a separate roll of drawings; I’m going to find that house.” We got the drawings out and we said, “We didn’t put a bathroom over the garage, and this is a permit set.” It took a year and a half before the lawyers got down to making depositions. We never knew what had actually flooded. We didn’t know why they were suing us. I go into this deposition, I have the drawings, and I said, “Where was this flood?” “It was over the garage. It was a bathroom and a bedroom.” I go, “Here is the permit set. Do you see a bathroom or a bedroom over the garage in my drawings?” They did that without permission, and the builder didn’t even know they did it. It took two years to solve it, which was crazy.

IG: It is good to have good documentation of each project. You never know.

LS: Yes. It’s a very good lesson. Anyway, back to clients. Casey was also really good at these ergonomic ideas. Even though he had a business degree, he thought like an engineer a little bit. In the first condo, the Water Tower condo, I suggested, “Casey, what do you think about the idea of reaching in to turn on the shower, so you don’t get wet over here?” We put the shower head here and the valve over here. He goes, “I love that idea, and I want you to do it on anything I ever do.” We have done it on every house since then. He says, “Don’t forget, I want that shower valve over here.”

We would come up with things that made life easier, I mean, what we could think of. Even the clients would say, “I really like having this on the right-hand side over the stove.” We really worked hard to think ergonomically. One of the things I was realizing, because I was looking back through projects that I did with students, is that when I was at Florida A&M, I did this project where I said, “I want you to study how a person moves while they are doing something and make a model of it.” I would never give somebody that project today—those models are so hard to make. But it was amazing what the students came back with. One was a guy working at McDonald's making the burgers and the fries. They had these little projectiles, the hands were here, they went here. These models turned out really cool. We had good, good people coming for lectures at Florida A&M then, we had all this money. I think Frank Gehry was there. I realized what I had done for those students, which I didn’t even think about then. I had made them think about people and space. One student later came back to me and he said, “You know, those studies that we did where we would really be watching people and what they did, that has helped me so much because I’m really thinking about what the client does and how they use space.” That is what we were worried about. How do they use the space they are in? I was realizing, “That was a good project, wasn’t it?” Back then, it was sort of more like academic. It was this attitude that I think I have always had that I wanted to really understand what people did, and what they did with space. Then try to bring that into how they live.

IG: You have also done other projects that were not single-family homes. I’m interested in hearing how that design process or that way of thinking may be applied to other typologies.

LS: We did a project for World's Finest Chocolate, which was their laboratory where they tested the chocolate as it gets made. They always have to do this testing. We were asking, “Well, what do you need in that space? What do you use? And then where do you go from this part of it to that part of it?” Same conceptual thinking, but different office type or product type. We have done office spaces for clients trying to understand, “Who needs real privacy? Who needs connections between each other?”

We did a project for Eagle River Financial, which received an Interiors Award. They had a logo, and their logo was a fish. Eagle River was, I think, a river in Wisconsin. Terry Graunke was the client, and we said, “We want to think about how to use your logo as part of the design of the space and represent who you are, what you do.” It turned out they leased this space at 676 North Michigan Avenue. Michael Jordan had his office in this building. Their space was kind of this long, narrow space, and somehow part of it was cut out; it might have been elevators or something there, and then it turned the corner, so there was more view to the east at the end of it. We decided this fish idea could work with navigating through the space where you had to turn. We had these ceiling layers with the fish shape. Then, at the turn, it was a bigger fish shape, and we designed all the desks and everything. It was the same idea for an office: what they did in the space, how they used it, where the conference room went, where that should be, and where the executive office would go.

That is what guides for me a lot of the ideas. As we got more into interiors, I realized we could express who they were with elements that we added or brought into the space that described their logo. That came out of the idea of what we did with clients that we did houses for. Then Terry says, “Would you do my office?” And I say, “Yeah, I’d love to do your office.” We get that sense of expressing who they are and what they do as a very important element.

IG: What would you think was the typical split of work in the office in the early 2000s in terms of residential versus other type of projects?

LS: I think we have always had a 60% residential, 40% other type. When Pam and Greg came in as associates with me, that’s when I said, “Doing residential all the time is like only eating dessert. It’s really fun, but it’s not nutritious enough for us as architects.” I said, “We really need to try to get other kinds of work, more of it, and not just happenstance.” One of the reasons we got Terry Graunke’s office was because we did Casey’s office in the same building, and Casey knew Terry. That was like, “My friend Terry Graunke is over here, he would like you to do his too.” We have worked really hard to expand into and get WBE [Women-owned businesses] City of Chicago projects, so that we were not just conceived as a residential firm. We need to do work. Getting a WBE from the City of Chicago was 200 pages of documentation. You have to do lots of paperwork. We had to get interviewed by one of the Capital Development Board (CDB) guys who decided that Joe’s office was helping us too much and we didn’t qualify, because we were sometimes working with them. When Anne Blossfelt was still with me, she and I did the interiors for their project out in California at UC San Diego. They did the graduate student dormitory, and we did all the furnishings for that. That was near the end of when things got really bad in 2008. He was asking, “What’s this project?” “We did that with Valerio Dewalt Train.” He got so convinced that we were not a firm by ourselves, which we really were, that he said, “No, you don’t qualify.” Greg helped because he knew a little bit more about marketing than I did. The reason we got the Hale Elementary project was because we had qualified first with the city, and we worked with Eckenhoff Saunders Architects. We got one third, they had two thirds of the contract. That’s how that worked out. Greg, like me, is so hands on.

IG: Can you talk about your 55 East Erie residential project?

LS: Yeah. That was in 1999. We were the design architects and Fujikawa Johnson & Associates was the architect of record.

IG: That was a big project in the office.

LS: Very big. That’s when I had Kevin Hall, and I was thinking Kevin Hall might become a partner. That didn’t work out, let’s just put it that way. I had already done a series of things with Matt and Joyce, personally for them. Then, Kathy Quinn and I had started on the Walsh Higgins project, which didn’t go on for a while, and then my office ended up doing the prototype houses. I think 55 East Erie was Robert Stern as the original designer, and it wasn’t working at all. I don’t know what happened. Matt said, “Let’s get Linda.” Fujikawa Johnson had been on it from the beginning, before we got in. I was thinking, “This is overwhelming. I don’t know what to do.”

IG: This is a 56-story building in River North.

LS: This is the only real high-rise that I’ve ever done. I look back on it and go, “God, I could have done this. I could have done that.” There was so much... It could have been better. We were hired to be the design architects and do the elevations and plans. People started to realize these floorplans were really good. The prices in that building have gone like that [pointing up]. We would end up going to all the OAC [Owner-Architect-Contractor] meetings. The mechanical guys would be in the meetings or the plumbers or something, and they would say, “You have to do this and that. I’ve got to have a chase space two feet deep all the way through to the living room.” I’m like, “Wait a minute. We didn’t think you were going to do that.” We ended up being there through a lot of the construction that we never expected to be—that far and that long in—to figure out how to keep them from doing bad things. I’m like, “What if we hadn’t done that?” We didn’t really get paid that much. It was just like, “I’m not letting them destroy the building.” It was not easy. Then they hired this goofy interior designer to change the lobby, and I was screaming at them like, “Please don’t do this.”

IG: I'm familiar with the building and the lobby doesn’t look the same as the rest of the building.

LS: It’s not. I had this really cool terrazzo floor with an interesting design that matched what was going on outside. They changed it all to this black and white floor. I was like, “This makes no sense. Why did you do this?”

IG: It is a very interesting project that I think stands out in River North, where they built a lot of mediocre high-rises in the ’90s; there is nothing very interesting. This project has a presence.

LS: Do you think so?

IG: Yeah.

LS: I still don’t think it’s as good as it could have been.

IG: You can see that there is a design intent, when a lot of them lack any idea.

LS: Right. The location is great. The reason that they have the arcade was because that gave them more FAR [floor area ratio]. It was back when there was the old zoning code. I was already on the Plan Commission, and I knew about it. It got to be 559 feet tall because 600 would have put them into plan development. The arcade gave them that extra FAR. I think the townhouses maybe got added before. I forget how it all worked out, because that was already somewhat in place by the time I got there. I went back to the planning department and I said, “Do you believe that this building that has 194 units, is one foot shorter, and it got this arcade? And because of that, it didn’t have to go through planned development review?” They said, “Really?” I was like, “Think about this, guys. It is wrong that this happened. I know I was involved in the building, but it’s not right.” They changed it after that. They really looked back at what kicked in to be a planned development versus what it was before, how many units, how tall. They changed a lot of the regulations. That was when this building over here got built, which is Grand Plaza, which I think is horrible. It was that period of time when this was going on. I remember Blair [Kamin] came in, writing, “What’s happening in the city? These things going up are just crap.”

IG: I think it’s a pretty dark period in terms of the residential buildings in this area of River North and the Near North Side.

LS: Right. It’s too bad it happened that way. It really is, because I think the city woke up, but a little too late to realize, “We can influence this and make it much better,” which they did a little at least.

IG: Before we talk about the transition in your firm with Pam and Greg, I’m interested in talking about some of the projects in Michigan. You did a lot of projects in Chicago and North suburbs. I’m curious how you transition from being a local architect, where you work on buildings where you live and where you have the office, to working in a different place. Did that change a little bit the way you approached the projects? Did it feel like a natural progression?

LS: At the time, it felt pretty natural. For instance, we did two houses in Kenilworth for Casey Cowell in the ’90s while he was still at U.S Robotics. Then he sold U.S Robotics, and by that time, he had divorced his first wife and had married his second wife. Then, we did the house in Traverse City. Before the big house, he had us do a little fishing lodge. He loved to fish and he had grown up in Michigan. This was the first thing we did in Michigan. It was before the big house. He bought this little cottage and we remodeled it. Then, there was this other little, almost like a bunkhouse or something. It was a cute little set of buildings.

I know what happened. He had a piece of property on the lake, but it was not in Traverse City. It was just north of Traverse City. We had come up with this really cool idea of a house. It would be a modern manor house kind of thing where there were these very beautiful fireplaces that went through the center, three or four of them, with this long rectangle. We almost got it into construction, pretty much construction documents. Then he says, “I found a bigger property. We are going to start over.” I looked at the property, and this one was where we built the project. It’s a 20,000 square foot project. It’s a 15,000-square-foot house (which is still probably the biggest house we ever did), maybe about a 1,000-square-foot workshop, a four-car garage with an exercise room, and then a pool house. Those were the other 5,000 square feet. But the property was flat at first, and then it quickly sloped down towards the lake, a good 10 feet difference. We couldn’t do the house that we had designed for the other site. I said, “Casey, it’s not going to work here. It won’t make any sense because the whole back of it will be falling off the edge.” We just did a whole new design. It was maybe 6,000 or 7,000 square feet at first. He goes, “No, I need it bigger.” He kept making it bigger. His second wife had three children. He had three children. We had to have a room for every child, and the size just got out of control. It doesn’t look like it from the front because the back goes down, and that is where the two stories are. But I was like, “God, this thing is huge.” I’m really happy we never had to do another one of those because I just think they are crazy. Everything he has done since then has been smaller too.

That was probably the beginning of our houses in Michigan. It got published in Architectural Digest. We did another couple smaller ones, and Greg and Pam have done a lot of the Michigan houses other than Casey’s, although we were working on a recent one for Casey. It was on a lake, but not on Lake Michigan. He discovered that there was going to be a venue around the corner of this lake from him that would be for weddings and stuff. He was like, “No way. We are not living anywhere near that.” That project ended last year. But really, I’ve been involved in everything we’ve done for Casey. Pam and Greg have done a lot of the other Michigan projects.

IG: Pam and Greg have been with you for quite some time.

LS: Yes. Part of the story too that you have to know, which I’m not sure whether you know: 55 East Erie happened in 2000, and Greg came on right after that. I’m trying to remember when he moved here. Pam came in 1998 at LaSalle Street. Maybe Greg came there too, but then we moved right away to 500 N. Dearborn.

IG: What year did you move to this office?

LS: 2004 or something like that. I started talking to them about becoming partners maybe in 2003, 2004. In fact, we even set up a partnership agreement. Bill Dwyer was a client, but he was also my attorney. He helped us figure out how to do this transition. During that process, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006. I think part of that came from the stress I went through doing 55 East Erie. It was so crazy. It was just constant mental difficulty for me.

We kept talking about the transition because I didn’t know if I was going to make it. I was diagnosed in October of ’06. I had to go through radical surgeries, ended up getting some infections, and I ended up with a hernia. All this stuff happened between ’06 and ’08, and then my dad passed away in ’08. I was really rethinking what I was going to do with my life. Should I go through this kind of stress or is this is what’s going to kill me? I was like, “This is probably killing me, that I’m working my butt off 50, 60 hours a week and being part of the Plan Commission, doing stuff for AIA. Where am I? What’s left of me?” I really had to rethink how I was going to spend my time. You realize money is not very important at all. Time is everything. I still think that today. The older you get, the more you say, “Time is everything.” It’s the most important thing. I came back to work, and then I said, “Okay, I’m back. I can work.” We kept doing different projects. I probably stepped back a little bit because I knew that they were going to take over eventually. I said to Pam and Greg, “You take this client, and you take that client. I’ll work with you on this, or I’ll take this one.” We very equally split up the work. We still always worked together. We would have charrettes in the office or critiques of each other’s stuff. We knew the clients pretty well. I always knew who the client was at first. Now I’m like, “Who’s this one?” I know I don’t know any of the new ones now. But it gave me this sense of, “I know I’ve been incredibly involved for a long time, and I’m not going to let go, but I have to save myself.” That’s what I went through.

IG: You feel like you can always do it all, that you take on that responsibility, and that you have done that for so many years.

LS: Yeah. At that time—I’m 78 now—I said, “I’m going to retire in 2016.” More or less, I did. But I would still come back and do something, even little things for friends, or even Cathy Odelbo, whose house we just recently finished, Odelbo Residence. I was pretty involved in it because she was my really good friend. Some people in the office helped with it, but this is my project, my client; I’m not letting her go. And now we are doing the pool house for her, but Greg is taking that part over.

IG: Were Pam and Greg the people who led the office during your health challenges?

LS: Yes. I was pretty much gone from the office for four months. The chemo was so debilitating; I could hardly move. It was just unbelievable. I knew it was going to be bad, but you can’t imagine. You can’t. Then, I had these little complications of things that happened in between too, so it didn’t help. They kept everything going, and I thought, “This is great. They can do it. They don’t necessarily even need me, because they did it without me."

We made it through that. Then, 2008 and 2009 happened, and we were all sitting around. It was Pam, Greg, me, and Jill, the office manager. That was who was in the office then. We were saying, “How are we going to do this? How are we going to make it? Can we buy staples this week? Where do we have to not spend any money?” We each took a 20% reduction in salary. The goofy thing was when I came back, I got to get on disability insurance because we had it for a little while. Then, I was coming back to work, and I was getting paid again just before the recession. I called up the insurance company. I said, “I’m back at work now, so I don’t really need this disability insurance anymore.” The lady says, “Are you sure? Are you crazy?” I said, “I’m making a salary. I can’t do both.” I should have just kept the disability, if I had known what was coming. We didn’t know. We got through ’09 by the skin of our teeth. “What are we going to do? What can we do and how can we make it, so we don’t have to close the office?” It was that serious for us. We got through it, and then Casey came back with another project. He had moved to Palm Beach. We remodeled and added onto the house in Palm Beach for him, which was an interesting thing. I was licensed in Florida because I had already lived there so long. My second license after Illinois was Florida. I just did NCARB (National Council of Architectural Registration Boards).

IG: A reciprocal license.

LS: Yeah, I just wanted my Florida license. It was pretty easy back then. We ended up doing the Palm Beach house. Another client of ours was Carol Bernick, who is now the CEO of Alberto Culver. Leonard Lavin was her father. She went through a divorce as we worked with her. She would never let us photograph her projects. She also had a condo in Palm Beach. She knew I was doing something for Casey, and she had an architect down there who was not even working. He was just doing nothing. She said, “Would you work on this?” I said, “Okay. You have to tell him he’s fired. I’m not going to poach in on him.” We helped her get her condo done.

IG: It was your previous clients that actually helped you got through the hump of 2009.

LS: Yes, it really was. AIA was asking, “What do architects have to do to get work?” I said, “One thing they can do is keep the clients they have.” Little did I know that when I was on the national board in, I think, ’97 through ’99. Then, they asked me to come back and fill a vice-presidential position for Helene Dreiling because she decided she wanted to be on the staff of AIA. I did. But then I said, “No, I’m not running for president. No. I won’t do it.” I’m glad I didn’t because it would have been another strain. My office was pretty small still in 2000. I had maybe six people. Then, when we were downstairs, because we were on the ninth floor at first, we ended up with 12 people at one point.

IG: Was that the peak size of the office?

LS: Yeah. That was probably about the peak. We were doing a house for Jack Higgins in Michigan then, which was a very early Michigan project. There were probably a couple of others like that, where they were clients from Chicago that had Michigan houses and wanted something done there. I think Dan Wheeler is similar in that he would do houses for clients and then they would want something over there. One of my mentees [Calli Verkamp] is now a partner at Wheeler Kearns, and I think she was working on one of those houses.

The other thing we did too was a lot of us from Chicago—Andy Metter, Dan Wheeler, Julie Wheeler, Rick Phillips, Joe and I, Margaret McCurry, Carol Ross Barney—would all go to the National Design Committee meetings. We would go to Italy; we would go to Paris. They were the best because we were walking around with fifty other architects talking about buildings all day. “What do you think about that?” And they ruined it. They still have them, but now they are just so darned expensive. If Joe and I want to go together, it’s double. We just said, “This is getting crazy. We can’t do it anymore.” But in those design committee meetings, we would hear a lecture from one of the architects in that city. We went to Sevilla, which I loved. Joe and I went to Madrid on our own. I had never really spent that much time in Spain before; we were always going to Italy, because his family is there. We would always have to go to Rome.

Those trips were so influential. You would come back here, and you go, “Oh, they built a whole school in Norway out of wood, everything. How did that happen? How did they do that?” It’s a way to keep up your thinking about design and architecture in general, just to see these other cities.

IG: Just for the record, when was the partnership established with Pam and Greg?

LS: I’m trying to remember it was exactly. It was signed in 2008. The partnership agreement that we had started with, which was I would give them a bonus so that they could buy a part of the firm over a period of time, fell apart with the recession, because what could we do? I mean, we didn’t have money for bonuses. I called up Bill Dwyer, “What do I do now?” He says, “Just don’t do anything, just wait it out.” It was in 2016 when they officially purchased the whole firm and bought me out. It was probably 2013 or 2014 when I owned 40% and they each owned 30%, something like that. We just did a very slow transition.

IG: Was 2016 when you officially retired?

LS: Yes. Then I just worked as a consultant, but for a while I was still working 20 or 30 hours a week anyway. Then Joe and I started going to Florida a little more. If I worked, it was remote, but that was a little easier then. I would come back every so often if I needed to.

IG: You talked earlier before about the mentee at Wheeler Kearns Architects. You have also been very involved in the AIA Bridge Program.

LS: Yes.

IG: Can you talk about your interest in mentoring?

LS: Matt Dumich was at Joe’s office then, and he knew I was involved with AIA. He said, “Linda, I really think you should join us in this Bridge program.” I went, “Oh, yeah, that sounds good. I should do that.” I have always felt like it’s my obligation to help someone younger. Even in my firm, I try to do that. I said, “That sounds good. I’d like to do it.” I had mentees until I just couldn’t do it anymore because we were spending six months in Florida. Basically, that’s when I stopped, because it was just impossible to do more. I said, “I’m not going to take a mentee and then go absent on them. That’s crazy.” Calli Verkamp is probably the person that I have spent more time with, but Wei Yu and Kelly Moinihan were my mentees too.

What was great about the program to me was that, first of all, I could make a lunch date with my mentee, or they could come and visit the office, and we would spend time here or whatever we did. Our meetings would be as a group of fellows plus mentees in a larger group. We would go to a certain office space and have a discussion about a certain topic: future of architecture, etc. There was Dan Wheeler, there was Pete Landon and Jeff Bone. I think David Woodhouse did it for a while, a few colleagues of mine. And it was great to talk with all of them. Then, we would have young people—fellows—and it was amazing. It was just really good. I loved those programs.

They were a way to get to know what young people were thinking, because some of them were very like, “Well, I think it’s going to be this way.” We were talking about what it used to be like back when we were in school, drawing ink on Mylar in the office, and how different it is now and what happened with technology in between.

IG: Technology wise, it is a whole other world.

LS: It’s a whole other world. I mean, it’s incredible. It is hard to even describe. I mean, I’m telling you about buying the first calculator we bought for $80, and I’m like, “God, has it changed?” Because I was so busy all the time, I never got to learn AutoCAD. I have never really done drawings in AutoCAD. I would be constantly saying to people in the office, “Print that for me,” so I could draw on that. It’s too bad because even Joe has learned to use MicroStation. He’s not as facile as some, but he can do it. Since I was either meeting the client or trying to figure out what this should look like with some little detail or I was at City Hall for a Plan Commission meeting, I never got to draw in AutoCAD. I do regret it now that I didn’t.

IG: I’m curious about how you see the architecture community now in Chicago. I know you spend six months in Florida, six months in Chicago. But having worked for so long in Chicago and having taught, I’d like to know how you perceive where we are in the architectural community and the younger generation.

LS: It’s interesting. I feel like I am a bit separated from it now, so I don’t know if I can really completely answer that. I’m very happy right here because I think Pam and Greg are doing very well. I am bothered, and I think this is across the board, about the lack of being physically here [in the office]. I think that’s a problem. I think it will become more of a problem.

My good friend that I did the house for, Cathy, came here on a Monday. Greg is not here on Mondays; I don’t think the rest of the office either. She came here on a Monday to deliver a check to pay for the bill, and nobody was here. She says, “I came to your office, and nobody was there.” I said, “I know. It’s terrible.” I do worry about this in the long run of what this means for the community, because I feel like Chicago has always been pretty close-knit. I think we all like and respect each other a lot, unless we know that someone’s done something really bad. I have been friends with Margaret [McCurry] and Carol [Ross Barney] now for years, and I wouldn’t give that up for anything. Because I was involved with Archeworks, even Stanley [Tigerman] liked me for a while.

Because we have these efforts that are on the fringes of the field, let’s call it, the real architecture we do, our work and our projects, help us stay glued together. AIA Bridge is certainly one of them; Archeworks was one of them. AIA is obviously one of them. Jen [Masengarb, Executive Director of AIA Chicago], I think has done a great job of keeping that going pretty well. I don’t know what New York is like compared to us, but I’ve always heard they are very separate and they are not much of a group of colleagues. I am sure there are small groups.

IG: It has been almost ten years since you retired. I’d like to know how you see the firm now and how it might have evolved from when you were 100% in the firm.

LS: COVID changed everything. In Joe’s office, they only recently said, “We’re back five days a week. That’s it.” A couple people left because they said, “I can’t do it.” If I had stayed here and I was still a partner or an owner, I would not let this happen. I would just say, “Maybe Friday afternoons,” because we used to do that.

IG: Summer hours.

LS: Yeah, we did summer hours so we could take Friday afternoons off. Then we decided we didn’t even like doing that anymore. I don’t know how you stay committed to the group as a whole when people don’t come to the office. In our case, Mondays they are closed and a lot of times Fridays; last Friday, two or three people were here.

I don’t think remote Zoom calls can do it for us. Yes, it’s possible. It was a good thing we had it during COVID because we had to, we had no choice. But then we got vaccines, we got things that brought us back together again. We are still acting as if we are able to do this part. For me, architecture is such a collaborative, important, connected process that I think you lose it when you don’t have it every day.

IG: If you have worked with someone for so long that you understand the process, you might get away with not being in the office certain days. However, to build a practice when you have young people that you haven’t spent much time with, that you don’t have a well-oiled machine, is hard.

LS: Right. That’s hard. That’s where it gets lost. One of our young women who is getting married, I think this fall, just gave her notice that she’s going to leave. I have a feeling that it is partly because she doesn’t think she is connected enough.

IG: When we were in architecture school, a lot of things happened outside class time. People from other years had deadlines at different times, and you were part of that craziness; you were in the middle of things when you were present.

LS: Yes.

IG: You also built a lot of trust with other students by being in those situations together.

LS: Right.

IG: When you are in the middle of a project and perhaps there are hard decision that need to be taken, people need to trust each other. If you haven’t built that trust, it is very hard to have a productive conversation where people know where you are coming from.

LS: It is really hard.

IG: You have received many awards for the projects you have designed over the years. During the last five years, you have received the Chicago Woman in Architecture Lifetime Achievement as well as the AIA Chicago Lifetime Achievement. You have been recognized now for all the contributions that you have done, both as a practitioner and as a civic architect for your service to the city. Are you thinking about your legacy in terms of the work that you have done, how it gets archived, and where can someone know more about your work?

LS: It’s interesting. I think it’s one reason I wanted the firm to go on, because I thought, “What will happen if it’s over?” There are firms that are like this. “If I’m the only owner and then I leave or die or whatever happens, what happens to this?” First of all, I didn’t want that to happen. I didn’t want this to just go away. To me, I wanted to be a legacy with Pam and Greg and then hopefully another generation if necessary.” I mean, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill figured out how to make that happen into a whole bigger, different way.

I’m not sure how exactly we are going to completely archive things. That’s a good question. We have all kinds of drawings in the storage that we keep, all our models that are around here, all over the place. People don’t build so many models anymore because they could do it in 3D drawings.

IG: There is something about the beauty of the physical models.

LS: I love models. I have always loved models. I was telling Joe about this the other day, and I said, “I can’t remember what our project looked like.” Then I opened this up and there was the model. I was like, “There it is.” It was so funny.

What will happen if you’re gone? This is a hard question.

I thought about doing a book at one time. In fact, my niece was going to help me do it, and I called it Architecture Stories. It was really about the clients, the project, and how it happened. I have just never quite been that passionate about getting it done at all. There are things I’m passionate about getting done, and then there are others. I’d rather be a mentor than write a book. I think probably you could tell from talking to me. I think I’m much more visual than verbal, and I am much more interested in the present.

The reason I even wanted Searl and Associates to become Searl Lamaster Howe was that I wanted it to go on, but the best way I could imagine it going on was to have people continue it—keep doing it and doing it as well or better, for sure. And they have. I’m very proud of both of them for how they have carried on the office and the kind of work we do. It’s still beautiful. It’s still conscientious. I guess that’s important to me.

If we have a legacy, it will be the memory of what we did and not necessarily something monumental.

IG: It is a great way of thinking about legacies. It just continues. Your DNA and your way of thinking that Pam and Greg carry on in their own ways. Other people think about where their archives are going to be, publishing a book, or capturing it in a different way. Partly, this is why we conduct the oral histories. It is about leaving those traces.

LS: Yes. That’s why I said yes to you. Time, as I said, is important to me, but I was thinking, “This is important; this is not something I’m going to ignore.”

IG: The lessons that you learned through your career will be very relevant for others, whether they are the next generation or three generations later.

LS: Yeah, we don’t know. I’m thinking back on Kathryn Quinn, and it is very sad. I think you probably know she has dementia or Alzheimer’s. Her legacy will probably disappear. She was talented and smart and did some nice work, but she had to close her office. There was nothing else she could do. That’s pretty sad.

IG: You get to a point that you never know what is going to happen. It’s like being able to capture these oral histories at a moment when a person is able to tell their story in their own words.

LS: Right.

IG: This is different, but I have reached out to several architects, and most people they want to do the oral history. However, a few have said, “I am still practicing. I don’t want to feel like it’s the end of my career.” I was like, “No, no. Now is when you can talk about your career, it doesn't mean that it’s the end.”

LS: Exactly.

IG: “You have been around long enough that you can talk about your career, you can explain your path. It doesn’t mean that you are done." Dan Wheeler is still designing. He’s still going.

LS: This is another story Calli told me about him. She says, “Sometimes we go home and we come back the next morning, and we realize Dan came in at 3:00 a.m.”

IG: Crazy.

LS: He is a civic architect in a different way, in that it is always something very closely related, like the lectures. He is always there. He was there at the Bridge reunion. Were you a Bridge person?

IG: I wasn’t.

LS: It is very good. I wanted to do something. Especially in the time when I got on the Plan Commission, I was doing such small work. I was like, “This is where I can influence the larger work, because that’s not usually what I do.” For me, this was a way that I could still contribute my knowledge and my expertise to the city instead of myself or my clients.

IG: I think that’s the key. Not everybody needs to contribute in the same way. Some people love writing, some people love to attend a lecture, and you contributed in an incredible way thinking about the city. It’s just finding that format or that structure that feels comfortable to each person. But at the end of the day, you are still practicing in Chicago, so that means somehow you have to give back, but not everybody has to do the same thing.

LS: Right.

IG: Thank you very much for your contributions and your time today.

LS: Thank you.