Summary: Robert Ivy, FAIA, is editor in chief of Architectural Record and vice president and editorial director of McGraw-Hill Construction Publications. Under his tenure, Architectural Record has become the world’s largest professional architecture publication and, in 2003, received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the publishing industry’s most prestigious award.

Occupation: Architect, writer, and editor.

Education: I have two degrees, and they both inform my work. The first is in English. I went to the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn. It has a strong writing program that really helped form me as a writer and an editor. After service in the Navy, I went to Tulane University School of Architecture, where I received a master’s of architecture.

Fusing English and architecture: When I went to architecture school, I was really focused on purely doing architecture, but I had an offer to write a story about architecture on the first day of my first job. My boss happened to be the editor of the AIA Mississippi architecture journal, and he needed someone to write a story. I was thrilled to do that. I volunteered for a number of years and became the editor of the state journal. Very shortly thereafter, I wrote for Architecture magazine, which at that point was the AIA Journal. I became a contributing editor and worked in that capacity for 15 years. At that time, I had a dual career—writing and editing, and architecture.

Path to Architectural Record: I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I was a consultant to the AIA as they were making a change with their publisher and publication of choice. Very few architects write or have experience in publishing. I was one of the few, so I was in a good place at a good time. Now, as editorial director of McGraw-Hill Construction, I get to be involved with a number of other publications and forms of media, including Engineering News Record and the regional publications, as well as the events and Web sites that accompany them.

Do you miss practicing architecture? I miss clients. Through the course of my active architecture career, I managed to do many types of buildings. Like many architects, I loved trying the new building types and I did most major types, except a high-rise building. But the one aspect that I miss most is the work with clients. I loved going to school board meetings and working with people. I loved finding out their hopes, dreams, aspirations, problems, and challenges and trying to help solve them.

I have other ways of working with people now. Obviously I’m in touch with the entire architecture profession, but it is different from having a personal client for whom you feel responsible. Now I feel as if the entire profession is my responsibility. They’re my client: my fellow architects all across the country, and now internationally, too.

The role of architecture media: The world of architecture has in a sense exploded because the international boundaries have been razed, methods of communication have changed radically, and the tools that we make our architecture with have been transformed. There are new ways of thinking about how to make a project. I think the role of our specific branch of media is to inform our readership and audiences through print, digital means, and live events of all of the information and change that’s taking place everyday; then, correspondingly, to inspire them and show the evolution of architecture and where it’s going, and where they might go as well.

How do you keep AR current with the profession? Record is in constant contact with our audiences. Our editors are in New York, linked in through standard communication means with architects all over the country. Our primary audience is domestic, and the majority are AIA members. We are talking to members and to readers on a daily basis, both by e-mail and by phone. Beyond that, we appear at events nationwide and seek out readers as speakers, lecturers, panel members, moderators, and jury members. Also, we are launching a wonderful suite of community building tools this month that will allow us all to talk to each other much more easily. These include the ability to post your own work to a visual gallery from out in the field, and forums—which we’ve now had for a couple of months—where you can state your own ideas about a given topic. You’ll even be able to vote on the projects that you like and recommend them to your friends, so we’re really trying actively to reach out to the audience and find out what they think. We care very much where people are, what they think, and what they’re doing.

What should American architects be doing more of? I have a real high regard for American architects and architecture. I think if I have a concern, it is that we need to go beyond answering the immediate question and fulfill the larger professional role of educating the public. That means reaching out to the public and representing the ideals of well-designed communities and sustainability that others look to us for. I think that’s a role that architects seek to play, but we’re only at the tip of the iceberg, and there’s so much more we can do as leaders. I think people are looking to architects for answers in a way that they have not done in my lifetime. The general public is more educated to what architects and architecture can do, probably following 9/11, but also just with the increased communication with the various media. I think they’re hungry for answers, and we can help by responding to civic need and serving in leadership positions, and by architects communicating with their public as citizen leaders. I think the society as a whole will benefit.

On being a transplanted New Yorker: I’ve always loved New York. When I was a child, my parents were familiar with New York and even though I grew up in the heart of the Deep South in Mississippi, the city that I lived in had many connections with the city of New York. When I was a teenager, I came to the city for my first real extended trip—not as a tourist—but, really to date my [future] wife. I married the lady from New York and continued to come back here. It isn’t unfamiliar territory. It’s so rich and varied that I sort of pinch myself when I walk through my neighborhood, and I continue to do so when I come up out of the subway. It’s so rich with texture, and where I live in Brooklyn has such a humane scale, variety, and beauty. I love the city, but I also love Mississippi still, and I do go back.

Current read: I’m reading a book called Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner, who’s one of the greatest writers that America ever produced. This is a group of essays about the West, ecology, and the environment from a variety of sources. He was a Westerner and an author that I think not enough people know about. I didn’t discover him until two years ago, but he wrote two of the best American novels that I’ve ever read in my life: Angle of Repose, which is about the settlement of the American West, and one of my all-time favorites, Crossing to Safety, which is about two college professors’ families and the intersection of their lives. It is one of the most poignant and beautiful books I’ve ever read.

Advice to young architects: It can be very frustrating to be a young architect. You’re constrained in your opportunities. Sometimes you are limited in the kinds of exposure that you get. If you’re in a large firm, sometimes you’re limited to doing detail work. I guess my advice would be that it’s a big world out there. Do everything in your power to broaden that perspective. The profession is so much richer than that single act of producing a detail, which is vitally important itself. But it’s so much broader than that because it involves society as a whole and our mark on the fabric of the world. It’s hard to have that perspective when you’re struggling to get a job, keep a job, and do the thing in front of you.

I would encourage young architects that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but also to make use of the time that you’ve got. One of the most enriching things for me was the ability to write stories while I was an intern. Every volunteer effort that I engaged in counted. I wasn’t paid in cash, but I grew in self-esteem and self-knowledge. I think that young people can find so many outlets for their talent and energy that go far beyond the office. I guess that would be my strongest advice: find those things outside the immediate present that will lead you down paths that you never knew that you wanted to go down. There are ways you can help and avenues you can explore that may lead you to a very different destination than the one that you’ve mapped out for yourself.