Linda Searl, FAIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Linda Searl, FAIA, is founder and principal of Searl and Associates Architects, PC, a 10-person firm in Chicago. She is a former president of Chicago Women in Architecture and AIA Chicago and has served on the national AIA Board as both regional director and vice president. Searl is a key figure in the Chicago planning community, serving on the Chicago Plan Commission for 10 years, currently as chair, and on the Chicago Design Initiative, a committee appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley to advise the City of Chicago Department of Planning on planning and design issues. Searl also was a member of the steering committee for Chicago’s Central Area Plan and co-chair of the Urban Design Task Force.

Education: I have my BArch and Master of Arts in Architecture from the University of Florida.

Career path: I taught for seven years at two different universities, mainly in the first- or second-year design studio, where we were teaching basic fundamental design ideas. After that, I moved to Chicago and worked for five years for Nagle Hartray and Associates. Then I met a woman who was going to start her own firm, and we became partners. I worked with her for five years, and then we decided that we were too similar in what we were interested in doing. As partners, you really need two people who are different: one who wants to do the marketing and the business and one who wants to do the design. We split up, and I’ve had my own firm since then.

Teacher, planner, designer: Which is the favorite role? I really do enjoy being part of the Chicago Plan Commission, because it’s very different from what I do every day. My firm focuses on residential work and commercial projects of a certain scale. But the projects I see in planning are all over the place: mega-projects like the Chicago Spire and Millennium Park and also small residential developments that happen all over the city. It gives me a way of looking at planning that I wouldn’t ever have in my own practice and helps me understand what’s going on in the city.

Chicago’s primary design issue: How to get good design. The development has just gone crazy here. The difficulty is to try to regulate good architecture and good design. It’s a tricky balance because there are no specific laws about how you do that. A number of cities have design review committees, but it really comes down to getting developers to see the light in the first place. The idea of sustainability, I think, has helped a lot because it’s focused developers along with architects to think about using different materials and more innovative techniques for solving a problem rather than the same old thing. I think that’s actually helped a lot. The City of Chicago has been encouraging LEED design and very sustainable projects by facilitating the permitting process at a much faster pace. So, if you have a LEED project, you can get through permitting in about two to three weeks. If you don’t, it could be three or four months. [It’s a question of] what carrots you can hold before commercial development to encourage good thinking, good design, and sustainable design. It’s a delicate balance.

Zoning changes the city: The City of Chicago just changed all of its zoning codes and you can see already different results going on because of that. One of the things the city is trying to do is encourage taller, thinner buildings, so the floor area ratio hasn’t really changed a lot, but the overall amount of green space is increased. They have been trying to encourage larger amounts of green space, including larger green roofs. Achieving that partly happens through the zoning code. The neighborhoods are regulated more by height restrictions and not so much by lot coverage as you see in many places, so the height restrictions have changed a little bit, which is allowing either greater density or less density depending on where it is in the city. It is fine-tuning what we already have, but doing it in a way that we think is compatible with various neighborhoods.

Time donated to professional and community organizations: I don’t keep track of it very well, but I would guess probably 10-16 hours a month; something like that.

On Archeworks: I’m also chair of the board of Archeworks, which is the school that Stanley Tigerman and Eva Maddox started about 13 years ago. Archeworks is an alternative design school, where students from all kinds of disciplines work together and create design solutions for social concerns. Last year, students from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago joined the Archeworks teams and worked on a project for stroke victims. They do very unusual but relevant topics that are about design, but in different ways than we think of as architects many times.

The Chicago Design Initiative: The Chicago Design Initiative is the committee to the mayor that advises the planning department. We talk about issues that are going on in the city. We’ve been meeting about five years: [since] right after the vote for Soldier Field. I was the sole vote against Soldier Field, because I really didn’t think it should go in Grant Park. I realized that I [was] in a lonely place because there are all these other architects, but nobody knew how to help. Nobody was really helping me in this dialogue with what’s going on in the city.

At the same time, John Syvertsen [president of OWP/P Architects, Inc. and Graham Foundation Board member] was talking with the commissioner of the Department of Transportation at the time about how to get more innovative design in Chicago. Between what I was going through and what John wanted to do, we started developing a group of people from various places: Graham Foundation and two universities and Chicago Architecture Foundation. Some are architects and some are not, like the Graham Foundation which gives a lot of money to architectural research and writing. We got this group of people together and started asking what we can do together. Over time, we’ve had little projects and big projects. We discuss what we think about the parking garage guidelines—Are they good? Are they bad? Are they too prescriptive? The city has really listened to us, which has been great.

Right now, we’re talking about the South Loop area because it’s up and coming. There are lots of things going on in the South Loop, and it’s very diverse from one block to the next. Recently, we got a group of architects and did a walkthrough of these various blocks from the south end of Grant Park to McCormick Place. We each decided to take a quadrant of this area and do our own analysis of what we thought was going on there and what should happen in terms of densities and improvements. This week, we’ll have a meeting with all of the people who did these various areas and talk together about what we learned. Then, we hope, the city will use it as part of an update to the planning document that they developed about five years ago.

Sometimes we just talk about a project that’s coming up and what things we think the city ought to be looking at that they might not think of as planners, but we think of as architects. It’s been a great dialogue, because we have people at the city who really want to interact with us. They want to listen, and so we’ve learned how to interact with them. We’re finding the ways to come together to solve a problem, which is really fun.

Favorite Chicago Landmark: Boy, that’s hard. There are so many. I would say currently it’s Millennium Park. It’s just so great that it happened and that people from all over the world are coming here to see it. It makes you very proud because, of course, we have lots of fabulous old landmarks. I love the Monadnock Building, Inland Steel, and a few others, but Millennium has really energized so many tourists and people in the city.

Who inspires: I think all of the people who work at the city in the planning department are really wonderful people. They work so hard, so that’s inspiring because you see how much they are trying. They’re getting things done in a way that you know they’re looking for answers. They’re looking for help and willing to listen, but they work their butts off to make this city a better place!

On the profession: I’m happy that there are more women in this profession now. That’s inspiring in a lot of ways to me. I want to see the profession get more diverse. It really needs to do that. We’ll be better architects for it. I think that there are people out there who are doing what they really believe in, and that’s good. If architects are doing what they believe in, eventually they’ll be rewarded. I think sometimes it’s a struggle to understand that.

Reading material: Currently I’m reading Crazy Sexy Cancer. I just finished chemotherapy treatments for ovarian cancer, so that’s been a struggle. I just had another blood test Friday and it was good, so yeah, I’m very happy about that.

I love reading lots of good novels, and there’s also a book called The Plan of Chicago [Carl Smith, University of Chicago, 2007]. It’s a nice little easy reading book on Burnham’s plan, which will have its centennial in 2009. I would recommend that as a good planning book.

Advice for young architects: I think young architects especially need to explore and find what their passion is and then really try to go and do that. Don’t get stuck someplace and never leave. Work for architects who are doing their own explorations, but who are able to teach as you work with them. You can learn the most when you learn as you’re working. I think there are offices that do that better than others. I’ve always considered it an obligation to make sure that young people in my office are getting a broad experience. Because we do small projects, we can let a fairly young architect take something on and do it from beginning to end—that’s hard to do in a larger firm. I think young architects need to say, ‘Okay, I know what I want and this is the way I’m going to get it’ and follow that path. Have a purpose about where you want to end up five years from now and how you get there.