by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: As the president and CEO of HMC Architects in San Diego, Randy Peterson has been instrumental in fostering the firm’s work/life balance atmosphere. Under his watch, HMC’s design committee has created xREF, a program that offers HMC employees the opportunity to “pursue an external interest and create an experience that connects them to a wider span of influence.” To help them achieve their dreams, HMC annually provides two employees with an extra week of vacation and a stipend of $3,000. The return for the firm lies in the employees’ “resulting personal growth and creative renewal [that] is reflected into all aspects of their lives, linking back to their work and enriching the lives of fellow HMC colleagues.”

Drawn to the profession: My interest in architecture goes back to the fifth grade, when I made a bet with my teacher. I was just 10 years old and I told him I’d be an architect. From that point on and throughout high school, I was always involved with drafting classes and so forth. I can’t recall what created the initial spark, but I have always loved architecture and that’s the only thing that I’ve been focused on.

Education: I attended Arizona State University in their dual architecture and engineering program and found that the engineering aspect of it wasn’t for me, so I backed out of that. Around that time, I met Bernd Foerster, who was the dean at Kansas State University. I liked Bernd, and he and I hit it off pretty well, so I ended up transferring out to Kansas State University. I graduated from KSU in 1983.

Foerster is a great man. He traveled all throughout the world, and he would come back and share the architecture that he experienced with all of his students. When I talked with him about transferring, he said, “Okay, but I want you to take my Introduction to Architecture class.” I was in my third year, but I took it and liked it so much that I actually would go back in every year of the three year professional phase and sit down in his class just to get reenergized again. He is a wonderful person who was able to share his experiences with all the students, and it truly made the Kansas State education special.

Early professional experience: When I graduated, I went back to Phoenix, where I was from at that time, and I met an architect named Al Beadle. Al was a Modernist in his design style and he was the local maverick architect. I really admired both his work and his passion for architecture, and he was a real big influence on me. I didn’t get to work for him because he was just a one-man shop, but we would meet from time to time and talk about architecture. He was key to me coming to California. He knew a landscape architect who knew an architect, and it worked out that I came to California in 1984.

I’ve worked for a few firms here in San Diego and experienced a lot of different styles of architecture. I would say that I did a lot of design work as a generalist for a while. I’ve done veterinary clinics, bank branches, and commercial offices, but over the last 15 years, the majority of my work has been in the educational field: some higher education, mostly K-12. I joined HMC in 1994 and became CEO in May of 2004.

The xREF program: That originated in our design committee—I’m not going to take credit for this. The credit goes to the people in our design committee who saw this and put together a few nice programs that have really invigorated the spark about design and architecture and the general atmosphere of the office.

There’s a dual meaning to the program name. xREF relates to our CAD world, where, in drawing, you reference something from one file to another file. It also means cross-reference. One of the things we’re looking at is cross-referencing people’s professional and personal lives. A lot of the reason for the xREF program was to be able to give people the opportunity to live out a dream that they have.

Employee and client take: It was a great idea, and the staff has loved it. We’ve engaged the clients in the selection process, and that’s been really successful. There are two groups of clients: one in Northern California and another group in Southern California, and it’s been nice to do something that isn’t necessarily related to architecture or one of the other services that we provide. It really brings out everyone’s personal side, and they’ve been happy to be a part of the process.

The program is going in its second year, and both the technical and non-technical staff have responded very well. There are people in administrative roles who have submitted their thoughts and dreams they’d like to live out. One woman who works closely with me had a nice submission last year about doing something that would help her get a little bit closer to some of the adventures that her father had a number of years ago. He had traveled throughout the jungles and the wilds of South America—in the circles with Teddy Roosevelt—so it was interesting. One of the people who won the program last year is a graphic designer in the firm, so it’s not just for the architecture staff—it’s for everybody.

Deliverables: We ask them to come back and share their experiences. The graphic designer who won is preparing a photo journal of his experiences and he’ll come back and share it. We do ask that there be some kind of document that we can pass around and share so that everybody gets to understand more about what the individual did. I think doing that will provide a little bit more information that we can share in the upcoming years so that people can get more excited about it.

HMC environment: One thing I would say about HMC is that we’ve always focused on the members of our firm as an extension of the family, so there’s a general atmosphere and attitude toward people that I think keeps people around. Historically, our turnover rate has been on the low end. We have a number of people—especially our senior leadership—who’ve been with the firm for 15, 20, 25, even 35 years. I think you always find that people who are just out of college will move from one place to another for a year or two. We all do it and it’s a good way of getting different experience. But once people really are looking to get settled down for the long haul in their career, HMC seems to be a place where people like to stay for the duration. It’s really been a wonderful environment. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about HMC: how everyone here cares about everybody else.

When we’ve gone through the exercise of using professional recruiters, the feedback I’ve gotten from them is that people who have interviewed with us always said very favorable things. We had one recruiter say that someday they wanted to write a book just on their profession, and that at that time they’d like to interview us as part of a chapter that talks about what we’re doing that makes people like the firm so much because there’s been such positive feedback. I think that just speaks to the culture and the people and the firm as a whole that really cares about people.

Program’s fate during tough financial times: I think it’s probably the most important time to keep programs like xREF going. We look at it as a budgeted item. It’s something that occurs during the year as opposed to at the end of the year once we’ve determined that we’ve made profits. From that standpoint, I see it going forward indefinitely. When you do have downtimes, whatever you can do to keep staff morale up and keep people engaged and energized about the firm is important. We’ve been fortunate enough to weather the storm with respect to recessions because we focus the majority of our work in markets that are a little more recession-proof, so that helps us keep these programs going year after year.

Current read: I am in between books, but I’m looking forward to reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. I read his The Kite Runner a while ago, and we just took our two sons to the movie last week. I really enjoyed The Kite Runner and the movie was quite good as well, so I’m looking forward to A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Best practice tip: Right now, the thing that I would like to promote the most to my colleagues is evidence-based design. I think it is so important to the success of projects as we go forward. We’ve seen so much in health care, and our clients are asking for evidence-based design much more. It’s getting much more into education, and it’d be nice to be able to get much more research in this area in order to be able to support evidence-based design and communicate to our clients that design matters. I would like to encourage everybody to become a little bit more involved in supporting evidence-based design.

I think more universities are going to take this on, and I think it’s even trickling down into K-12. The more we that can communicate to clients that design does matter, that it can make a difference, that the quality of design environment can enhance healing opportunities, that it can enhance learning opportunities, that in educational environments it can have a positive effect on student behaviors, the better that we will be at our jobs as architects and designers in delivering better quality facilities. At HMC, we are getting ready to bring on Eve Edelstein. She has her master’s in architecture and doctorate in neuroscience.

I met Eve a while ago through the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, ANFA, and I’ve sat on the board of ANFA. This is just something that over the past few months has worked out for Eve to join us. She will head up our research and design component and, for us, be able to mainstream the concepts of evidence-based design and communicate with our clients and design staff to support and integrate evidence-based design into all of our projects. We have been talking over the last couple of years—especially this last year—about having somebody much more involved in research.

Advice for young architects: I think that the first thing is to be passionate about your work. And I would say get close to your clients. Know your clients and know how they conduct their daily business. It’ll make you a better designer and your projects will be more successful.