by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: R. Nicholas (Ryc) Loope, FAIA, is the founder of a transdisciplinary graduate real estate development program (MRED) at Arizona State University College of Design. For seven years, Loope was president and principal of Taliesin Architects. Subsequently, he led the Durrant Group as CEO and principal from 1997–2002. Loope currently is the owner and managing principal of HL Design Build, LLC in Phoenix.

On the nickname “Ryc”: When I was in undergraduate school back in the days when we used press-on letters, we had to burnish these letters off of a wax sheet. The requirement was that you had to have your name on your presentation boards or the faculty wouldn’t accept them. At 3 in the morning, I was finishing up my project and putting my name on the boards, when I realized that I didn’t have enough press-on letters to spell Richard six times, but there are always a lot of Ys and a lot of Cs, so Ryc was born and I’ve never been able to get rid of it since.

Education and early professional career: I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland in the old five-year school. From there, I went to the master’s of environmental design program at Yale University when Charles Moore was the dean. I taught with Chuck and worked in his office. I studied under Charles Moore, James Stirling, Robert Venturi, and Colin St. John. There were a lot of great people. My thesis at Yale was Energy Use Strategies in the Built Environment, and my advisor was a fellow by the name of Everett Barber. Some of the components of my thesis had patentable aspects that my thesis advisor turned into a company, and when I graduated, I started working with that company.

We were acquired by a Fortune 200 company named Asarco, a very large non-ferrous metals company. The idea was that I would work with them for one year to help them understand the technology. Then, I was either going to go work in Charles Moore’s office or take a teaching job at Carnegie-Mellon. That one year turned into 10 years with Asarco. We built what was at the time the largest alternative energy company in the country, primarily doing solar, thermal, and photovoltaic devices and systems. During that period of time, I became the chair of the Solar Energy Industries Association and represented our industry before Congress and internationally before other trade associations.

About the mid-1980s, when my father passed away, in helping my mother straighten out his affairs, I had some time to reflect on my life to that point and said, “I went to school to be an architect and I really ought to give it a go.” I opened up a small storefront practice in Milford, Conn., a wonderful little shore town just south of New Haven. As I introduced myself to the community, I was very surprised by the lack of business acumen that our profession had—I worked with lots of great architects doing energy projects all around the world, but I hadn’t really been practicing architecture in its traditional form. [I set up practice there and] before I knew it, I had work on both coasts and was beginning to write and give some speeches in the AIA about the lack of business acumen in architecture.

Those speeches were read by a couple people out at Arizona State University, a fellow by the name of Jeff Cook in particular, whom I knew from the solar days and was on the faculty here at ASU. Just about that time, ASU was interested in restructuring their professional degree program and part of that restructure included strengthening their professional practice component of their degree program. They invited me out and I helped them construct a concurrent MBA/MArch program. This would’ve been back in 1989-1990, and it was so successful that they offered me a tenured position on the faculty, which I accepted.

Creating the MRED program at ASU: Four years ago, we received a new president: Michael Crow. Concurrent with his arrival, we have a new dean at the College of Design: Wellington (Duke) Reiter. The two of them together have a wonderful vision for the university and the college of it being much more embedded in our community, responsive to the larger social economic and cultural needs of our community, and with a research agenda that not only has some long-term interest, but has some ability to bring short-term results to bear on the issues confronting our community today. With that larger agenda, which Michael Crow is referring to as the New American University, we were able to propose a new curriculum for a master’s degree in real estate development (MRED).

Under the encouragement of both President Crow and Dean Reiter, we were able to successfully develop that curriculum, have it approved by the Board of Regents, and introduce the program in just under a year, which by university standards is light speed.

In August 2006, we had our inaugural class of 30 members of the Master’s of Real Estate Development Program here at ASU, and we graduated them last May. We have a 30-week full immersion accelerated master’s degree program, primarily for mid-career professionals, that prepares them for a significant career in real estate development. It’s been an amazingly successful program, already recognized broadly in this country, and we’ve even accepted students from overseas in its second year, so our reputation is growing quite rapidly. We have carefully designed this curriculum to balance people with backgrounds in design: architects and civil engineers and planners; people with backgrounds in law: JDs and LLMs; people with backgrounds in the construction industry: general contractors, GMs and PMs; people with backgrounds in business: MBAs, usually in finance and economics; and people from the real estate industry at large: brokers, lenders, etc.

We carefully balance the class among those disciplines and experiences so that we have a mixture within the class of all the key knowledge components that make up the principal exercises that are involved in real estate development. It’s a wonderfully cosmopolitan mix of people who have an energy that is second to none. The electricity that runs through this program on a daily basis because the backgrounds of these mid-career professionals—with their intensity and commitment to being successful—is just absolutely luxurious for a professor.

We have the senior faculty from the business school, the law school, the construction school, and me from the design college that make up the core faculty. We have about 70 walk-on players throughout the year that come from the real estate development industry at large, many of them nationally and some even internationally known for their contributions to real estate development who come through. They share their projects and experience with our students, supported by a wonderful advisory board. We meet every day with an amazing intensity and electricity that make this program whiz by. It’s amazing how fast 30 weeks goes.

On the MRED students: If you will, since it is football season, I’ll use a football analogy. It’s as if we’re educating the quarterbacks: not necessarily the most skilled player at any particular skill, but an all-around athlete who can look at the entire field and understand the changes in the landscape and reposition their assets in a way to most appropriately respond to those changes. When somebody isn’t performing the way they’re meant to, the quarterback can see that and make adjustments accordingly to be successful and, in the parlance of football, score. So, if you will, we see the people coming through our programs as the quarterbacks of the real estate industry: the folks of significant leadership and influence who will be forming our made environment for years and years to come.

The underlying goal: To prepare that next generation of leaders and influencers of the real estate development industry in a way that they can bring forward responsible real estate development that not only responds to the demographic and psychographic needs of their communities, but also has a larger cultural and environmental responsibility to those communities and our nation at large, and, quite frankly, to prepare ourselves for a more global engagement in real estate development. The world is rapidly moving to an urbanized condition, all around the world. The kind of development that we know well in this country is in great demand throughout the emerging countries in the world and there’s an opportunity for leadership and influence not only here, but around the world in responsible real estate development, and we are intent upon preparing that generation of leaders.

Hobbies: I love reading and I have a wonderful wife, Lynn Beyer, who’s an interior designer. She and I together enjoy the discovery of new environments when we travel. Between both of us being avid readers and travelers, I’d say that’s our hobby, but it’s very closely linked to our professional practice. We have two boys, 17 and 12, Nicholas and Garrett, and we have just loved watching them grow and participate in their entry into young manhood. Between lacrosse games and school plays, we’re fully committed.

Currently reading: Well, I just finished a series of technical books. One is called Ahead of the Curve by Joseph Ellis: fabulous book. Jerry Yudelson, who’s a good friend of mine back from the solar energy days, just put out a new book called Green Building A to Z, which I managed to get through on the last plane flight. It’s a really good book. Also, a book that I assign all the parents of the freshmen to our college to read called The Last Harvest by Witold Rybczynski. It’s a quick, easy read, but the reason I give it to the parents is so that they understand the larger struggles that it takes to bring a creative idea forward.