Features

JANINE UNGVARSKY  For The Times Leader

Don’t expect to meet Peter Bohlin in his office. Though five architectural firms in cities across America bear his name, you’ll more likely find him side by side with an associate reviewing a table full of drawings. Or, he could be camped out on a red wooden chair just to the left of his executive assistant’s desk in a cozy library-like nook in the heart of the firm’s home base on an entire floor of Wilkes-Barre’s Citizen’s Bank Building. You might even find him on a plane headed for Seattle, or Scotland or China — but not boxed in an office.

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Stegmaier Building, Wilkes-Barre

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Apple store Fifth Avenue, NYC

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About Peter Q. Bohlin

• Age 72

• Raised in the Bronx, New York

• Moved to the Wilkes-Barre area shortly after college graduation

• Currently resides in Waverly with his wife, Sally

• His home was once a black church during the Civil War; he also has a small home in San Francisco

• Has two children, Eve and Nathaniel, and two step children, Alex and Liz, as well as three grandchildren, Jack, 6, Andrew, 4, and Spencer, 1

• Graduate of Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and Cranbrook Academy of Art

• Principal founder of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, with offices in Wilkes-Barre, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle and San Francisco. The firm turns 45 in March 2010

• Winner of close to 500 professional awards, including the American Institute of Architects 2010 Gold Medal for outstanding contributions to architecture

• Bohlin and his firm have designed work ranging from the Stegmaier Building and numerous area residences to Apple Computer stores world wide, as well as art galleries in Hawaii, a visitors’ center in the Grand Tetons, Seattle’s City Hall, the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Pixar Animation Studios in California and the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia

• hen he’s not traveling, designing or drawing concept sketches for his designs, Bohlin enjoys gardening (he does vegetables, Sally does flowers) and visiting friends

• Declines to name a favorite design, but says he especially loves doing public places where people gather and projects that deal with sustainability. “And it’s a great pleasure to do things for children,” Bohlin said. “I know a woman who became an architect because she went to Camp Louise and was inspired,” he said.

• His advice to young architects: “Visit architects, visit buildings and read books. They should want to be an architect very badly because it requires that kind of love to do it and do it well. And if you really wish to do it and love to do it, you will become good at it.”

“I just avoid having an office,” Bohlin said. “We try to be out together. It’s more communal, much more collegial, less hierarchical.”

The man who disdains having an office has designed them for others, along with stores, government buildings, visitors’ centers, scout camps, homes and a host of other spaces public and private. In his 55-year career, his designs have garnered close to 500 awards, including his most recent: in early December, Bohlin, 72, was named the 2010 Gold Medalist by the American Institute of Architects. The Gold Medal is the highest individual award given by the AIA and the profession’s highest individual honor, given in recognition of an accumulation of work that makes a significant and lasting impact on architecture.

For Bohlin, that body of work includes such diverse projects as the reclamation of the Stegmaier and Woolworth’s Buildings and Intermetro’s corporate headquarters in the former Guthrie School Building, all in Wilkes-Barre, and the Nealon Federal Building and Courthouse in Scranton. Many Northeastern Pennsylvania Girl Scouts have enjoyed his work at Camp Louise, and numerous houses throughout the area started out as sketches drawn by one of the three or four old-school red wood pencils poking out of Bohlin’s shirt pocket. Much of his work features simple, clean lines and natural woods and materials, perhaps betraying his half-Swedish ancestry. “I guess I’m considered a soft modernist,” he said, “and to be a good one of those you have to be able to deal with a full range of places and a full range of landscapes.”

His designs also include Seattle’s City Hall, work space for the animators of Pixar and an art gallery in Oahu, Hawaii. And if you’ve ever been at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street in New York City and seen the giant Apple encased in a glass cube that tops a sunken Apple Computer store — well, that’s Bohlin’s work, too, one of a bushel of Apple stores his firm has designed around the world. But he doesn’t take sides in the Apple vs. PC debate; Bohlin also had a design hand in a house for Windows mogul Bill Gates.

These projects earned acclaim and racked up awards, something Bohlin experienced right from the start, even though no one ever set foot inside the first building he designed. “I designed a little stone church,” he said. “I was in parochial school and it was a first-grade project.” And though it takes a bit of prodding, Bohlin admits that was his first design award — the little church won first prize.

But just as he manages fine without an office, it seems Bohlin would still be the same outstanding professional without the awards.

“I probably feel better about what I do because of the awards, but that’s not what it’s about,” he said. “They are gratifying but really it’s doing things that are satisfying, that enable people to live better, that makes this worth it.”

“I always thought that I wanted to be a designer but I didn’t know what I was going to design,” he said. “I just fell into the right thing.” He entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s five-year architecture program. “Within a week, I knew I found what I wanted to do with my life,” he said.

While he was in school, his parents moved from his home in the Bronx to Wilkes-Barre, and Bohlin adopted Northeastern Pennsylvania as his home, too. After graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bohlin apprenticed in the area.

“If you find what you love to do, you tend to be pretty good at it,” Bohlin said, and he proved that quickly once he had his license. One of his earliest designs — a summer home in Connecticut designed for his parents — was featured in the New York Times Magazine. James Timberlake, the architect who presented Bohlin’s work for consideration by the AIA Gold Medal committee, said his peers thought Bohlin’s design “seemed to be above style and simple in origins.” The house — built in a wooded area where the leafy trees gave way to the evergreens — was stained dark green to blend with its surroundings and lifted on short stilts, minimizing its impact on the grounds. “Imagine, if the house were removed that the site would be completely intact, an extremely sensitive approach to its intrusion on nature,” Timberlake said.

“We’ve done wooded, natural settings and worked in the middle of the biggest cities in the world and everything in between,” said Bohlin. “Architecture at its best deals with the nature of people, the nature of places — whether they are in the natural world or people’s homes or places where they work. And it deals with the nature of materials, which is really fascinating.”

A vast number of his firm’s projects blur the lines between nature and building, from the Oahu art gallery that flows between a volcano and the seaside to a California home built in the shade of an ancient giant oak tree with limbs so long and tangled special “crutches” were installed to support them, enhancing rather than detracting from the the view from the house’s glass-walled bedroom.

Other projects encourage conservation and sustainability, such as the Pocono Environmental Education Center, which was set on site to make use of solar energy and uses an innovative fa�ade made of used tires sliced into durable, waterproof shingles.

“I would wish to do many more projects that deal with issues of sustainability,” Bohlin said. “It’s dealing with the future. Whenever you can deal with two or three things at once, it’s a more sustainable strategy and you get a richer space as well,” he says, citing one building he designed to have step-like ledges next to the stairs, creating an amphitheater effect where people can sit.

“Going sustainable is ethically necessary even if you don’t believe in global warming. You have to believe we are chewing up the resources at an alarming rate and we all need to think, ‘How do we do better with all this?’

“The best sustainability strategy is to find old buildings and work with them,” said Bohlin, who put 20 years of effort into the reclamation of the Stegmaier Building.

“It was deteriorating and it would not have been there forever,” he said. “Particularly in a community like ours where there is a need to do more with less, we need to find second and third and fourth uses for buildings that already exist and figure out how to make things people love so the buildings will stay there. It’s really fascinating work. We’re doing an Apple store in London in a 180-year-old building and the interplay of the design work we do for Apple and that old building is something.”

Rarely does Bohlin use the word “I” when referring to his firm’s projects. When he speaks of how his firm branched out from its Wilkes-Barre home to have four more offices in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle and San Francisco, it’s “We realized if we were going to be somewhat ambitious, we would have to build a larger base.”

Ask about his favorite projects and Bohlin will reply, “I like so many of the ones we’ve done....” Even when receiving an award, Bohlin is quick to credit his colleagues. The booklet from the AIA Gold Award presentation includes a quote from Bohlin that sums it up: “This award reaffirms the set of beliefs that we carry around with us and we practice — all of us and not just me as an individual.”

He calls the approximately 170 architects and 20-or-so staff members employed in the five offices “friends” and says the same about many of his clients. “So many people trusted us, starting with my parents, and many others, and it was through their trust that we were able to do this satisfying work,” he said.

“I’ve been at this for 55 years and obviously, you have to modify what you do,” he said. At the urging of Sally, his wife of 18 1/2 years, Bohlin travels less. “And I’ve been lucky because everyone in this practice is so capable and willing. When we have overseas work I may only have to go once and I can send very capable, talented people out on the more difficult travel.”

He also hasn’t hesitated to take advantage of the many technological changes over the years since his firm’s first home on Franklin Street in an old house where filing cabinets full of designs stood in unused bathtubs. “The tools have changed — the computer has become an absolute necessity and it didn’t exist when we started,” he said.

Materials and building techniques have changed too, Bohlin said. “We could not have done the glass cube for Apple back then. It simply wasn’t possible.”

“But people haven’t changed that much, even when everything else is changing,” Bohlin said. “People like us can make that change easy and we can help society to make those changes to make life better. Or we can squander our resources more and more. The economy has been a horrible challenge for everyone and for us. Reconciling people’s desires versus people’s budgets is always a problem, but it’s also one of the great pleasures of this work. You can do good things with a lot of money, but you can also do good things with a little money,” he said, noting even his parent’s summer home in Connecticut was scaled down for budget reasons.

“On almost every project, there are special concerns. We’re working on a very low budget loft for a client in the Poconos. Now that will be very interesting — how can we do something very economical but still have it be of value? We have to bring the same principles to it that we brought to the space we did for the Pixar animators. It’s painful if you don’t do that because you’ve let people down and you’ve let yourself down. We all believe that. Imagine how it tears you up if you don’t do your best. You must always do your best.”