Leadership in Architecture: My Passion in Life

By MacDonald Becket

Leadership in Architecture: My Passion in Life spans the decades from the 1940s to the 1980s. It focuses on the professional career in architecture of MacDonald Becket, FAIA, and the projects of Welton Becket and Associates and the Becket Group. An architecture firm headquartered in Los Angeles, California, its projects were located across the country and around the world, including Century City in Los Angeles; the renovation of the California State Capitol; Eisenhower Hall at West Point; Hyatt Reunion project in Dallas; the redevelopment of the Boston Common; six buildings in Seoul, Korea; the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing, China; and the World Trade Center in Moscow, USSR, to name just a few. His clients ranged from presidents of the United States to American captains of industry to the Shah of Iran.

Furthering his uncle Welton Beckets philosophy of Total Design, MacDonald Becket, and professionals under his leadership, focused on the client and provided full servicesfrom analyzing the architectural problem and researching the best financially feasible solution to interpreting the solution into the best design that would include such details as landscaping, art, and furniture. The total design, from start to finish, of a project, with the client as the focus, guided the companys thought process for every project.

Don Becket tells his personal view of his professional career building an international practice with multiple offices. The book features stories of challenging clients and sites, working in foreign (often unfriendly) countries, and managing a growing company. He weaves in lessons learned throughout his life and describes his approach to architecture and business. He practiced during the Cold War era and saw many changes in the field of architecturefrom technology and materials to contracts and business practice.

According to Becket, Architecture is not designing a pretty building. The architect must create a project that not only looks professional and pleasing but also fulfills financial goals and user functions. Every aspect of the project must be sustainable for a very long time. In Leadership in Architecture: My Passion in Life, Don Becket describes how he and his company kept those goals in mind for every project over multiple decades. His stories within are examples of his efforts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496935854

MacDonald Becket

MacDonald Becket was president of Welton Becket and Associates and chairman of The Becket Group, a large Los Angeles-based firm consisting of architects, planners, engineers, interior designers, space planners and programmers, and allied specialists offering comprehensive total design services on a worldwide basis. Over the years, the firm increased the scope of its work to include almost every major building type - from convention and civic centers to hotels, corporate office buildings, and major mixed-use complexes. Mr. Becket became a driving force in the development of architecture in Los Angeles and around the world. Two of his major roles in California were as coordinating architect for the master planning and architectural implementation of the 260-acre Century City project and in the successful renovation of the state capitol building in Sacramento. Mr. Becket was instrumental in the design and development of the 4500 seat theater, Eisenhower Hall, at West Point; the Washington, DC, Convention Center; Terminal One at the Los Angeles International Airport; the Federal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles; the Reunion Hyatt Regency in Dallas; several hotels at Orlando’s Disney World; Barclays Bank in New York, New York; and the redevelopment of the Boston Common. He expanded Becket’s development, investment, and international roles resulting in the unprecedented largest American joint venture in the People’s Republic of China with the 1006 room Great Wall Hotel in Beijing and in the former USSR with the World Trade Center in Moscow. Six major projects for the Samsung Corporation in Seoul, Korea, were also accomplished under his direction. Mr. Becket graduated from the University of Southern California in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture and later received a certificate in business economics from the University. He currently lives with his wife, Diane, of 32 years in Phoenix, AZ, and has 4 sons, 9 grandchildren, and 3 great grandchildren.

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LEADERSHIP IN

ARCHITECTURE

MY PASSION IN LIFE

MacDonald Becket, FAIA

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AuthorHouse™ LLC

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© 2014 MacDonald Becket, FAIA. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/25/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-3586-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-3587-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-3585-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014915258

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

ONE   EARLY LESSONS LEARNED

TWO   BULLOCK’S PASADENA

THREE   AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS

FOUR   WELTON BECKET AND ASSOCIATES

FIVE   GHOST HOUSE

SIX   WBA AND CLIENT CHALLENGES

SEVEN   EXPANSION OF OFFICES

EIGHT   10000 SANTA MONICA BOULEVARD AND OTHER WBA OFFICES

NINE   WBA NEW YORK OFFICE

TEN   NEW ZEALAND

ELEVEN SOLVING PROBLEMS

TWELVE   MAKING SOLUTIONS FINANCIALLY FEASIBLE

THIRTEEN   EISENHOWER HALL ROBERT BOB AHMANSON

FOURTEEN   FOREIGN OFFICES

FIFTEEN   KOREA

SIXTEEN   MORE ADVENTURES

SEVENTEEN   USSR – THE MOSCOW WORLD TRADE CENTER

EIGHTEEN   CHINA

EPILOGUE

INDEX OF BUILDINGS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

My uncle, Welton Becket, practiced architecture from the 1930s through the 1960s. He developed and implemented the philosophy of Total Design, the basis of a book published in 1972 after his untimely death in 1969. At that point, I took over the reins of our architecture firm, Welton Becket and Associates. One of my goals in writing this book was to illustrate and elaborate with personal stories the concept of Total Design, which I carried on and expanded in running our architecture practice.

In the decades from the 1930s through the 1980s, under the guidance of my uncle and then mine, Welton Becket and Associates designed and built hundreds of projects, many of them high profile, all over the country and around the world – the Los Angeles Music Center; Century City; the Grand Ole Opry House; Dallas Reunion project; Eisenhower Hall at West Point; renovation of the Boston Common; buildings in Australia and New Zealand; the World Trade Center in Moscow, USSR; the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing, China; multiple buildings for the Samsung Corporation in Seoul, Korea, to name a few. The firm employed thousands of employees, including architects, engineers, and interior professionals, in various worldwide offices. Leadership in Architecture: My Passion in Life describes the stories of how some of these projects came about and the people who were involved.

There are photographs of Welton Becket and Associates’ projects throughout this book. For clarification, I should say that all the projects shown were done when I was a project team member, project architect, the company’s president, or chairman of the board.

I’m not trying to impart new knowledge in this writing because a lot has changed since the 1940s when I began my career. However, I do want to communicate historical knowledge about architecture and doing business in foreign countries in the old days. After all, history does repeat itself. Here, I also write about how my associates and I went about developing a worldwide architecture practice, always challenged along the way but having a lot of fun. I don’t know how many countries I actually have visited, but I found that, for the most part, people all over the world are motivated in the same way and want to live peacefully. Of course, recent history shows there are a small number of misguided and aggressive groups that can stand in the way of the majority going about living their lives.

Over the course of my career, particularly in the latter half, I have been in countless conversations with all kinds of people. Undoubtedly during those exchanges, I would recount some of the adventures I had experienced during my professional life. To a person, the listeners encouraged me to write a book someday. That someday has arrived, and the following reflects some of the interesting people with whom I have dealt and some of the uncanny occurrences I’ve faced. Other intentions for writing this book are that I’d like my extended family to know about some of the exciting ventures I had over the years, and if another architect or business person can read this and relate to my thoughts, that would be excellent.

ONE

EARLY LESSONS LEARNED

At an early date, maybe while I was in junior high school, I learned some valuable lessons.

As the males in our family, my father, older brother, and I had to tend to the yard. As the youngest, I had to trim all the grass edges with hand clippers. As normal, my brother would push the lawn mower, and my dad would supervise, along with clipping the trees and bushes. I remember one Saturday in particular, after I thought I was done with my work, I took off running to play with my local friends. I heard my dad calling, Wait, hold on a second, you did not do your job correctly. This repeated itself three times, and finally, my dad was laughing. He said, If you had done it correctly in the first place, you could have saved yourself a lot of time.

Another time, one of my friends and I took our bikes early one Saturday morning to a small amusement park that as it turned out was still closed. There were no people present, but as we were walking by the shallow water of one of the rides, I spotted a shiny dime in the water and told my friend with a shout, Look! My friend retrieved the 10-cent piece, because I did not want to get my shirtsleeve wet reaching for it. I told the incident to my mother, who said simply, You should have reached for the dime yourself. After all, your shirt would have dried out. A penny found really is a penny earned when you pick it up.

One afternoon, I was walking alone next to a park on the far side of our home when three young men, who made it very clear that they were going to beat me up for no apparent reason, approached me from the high side of a hill. On impulse, I attacked the biggest of the lot, striking him squarely on the nose with a very painful result. I grabbed the second boy by the arm and swung him over a convenient depression in the park and then turned to the third boy only to see him running away. I think from that experience, I learned to never back down from adversity, despite the odds.

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Don Becket with his parents, Muriel and Hugh Becket, at Lake Sammamish, WA, about 1944.

I’m from Seattle, Washington, and I went to Lakeside High School – a boys’ school at that time. It’s been coed since 1973, which was after I graduated in '46. Even though I was senior class president and had done okay in school, I didn’t know what to do, college-wise. I applied to several colleges but went to San Jose State just to go somewhere. Having been there once, I wanted to get to California. I went to San Jose and started by taking every class that I didn’t know what it was because I did not know what I wanted to do, career-wise. The last quarter of my freshman year, I needed two more units, so I saw this one class that was titled The Home. I had no idea what it was, and I just punched it in and had my 15 units that I needed. The class turned out to be taught by an architect, an older, retired gentleman. The first assignment was to design a residence. I spent many Friday afternoons on the wooden steps of that Quonset hut classroom, talking about architecture with that wonderful professor. I became interested right then in the field. There wasn’t any other class in architecture at San Jose State, so I began thinking of other places to go to school. One big mistake I made was not to learn at an early age how to type. It was a big mistake, with computers coming just around the corner.

Unfortunately, at about the same time, my father was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage, and I hitchhiked back to Seattle in order to be with him before he died. I made it and was able to say good-bye to him. Many of his friends, along with my mother and I, attended his simple funeral. I returned to San Jose to finish out the school year.

My dad had been a high school principal and later a senior vice president of the Metropolitan Building Company, which managed office, retail, and other such facilities in central downtown Seattle. When he died, my dad was in the theater business, a family-run, legitimate stage theater in Seattle called the Metropolitan Theater. I remembered that the San Jose State professor who taught The Home said, Well, there’s a great architecture school at the University of Washington. I knew I had to go back to Seattle anyway to help my mother with the theater, so I applied and went to the University of Washington and majored in architecture.

In 1946, another important lesson occurred. I was sent back to New York City by my mother to buy legitimate theater plays for the following year. I dutifully went to New York (my first visit there), stayed in the Algonquin Hotel, and proceeded to the nearby theater district. Fortunately, I met with people who remembered my father and made the buying of plays an easy deal. As I was walking across Time Square on one of my many trips, I spotted in the sea of people a high school friend from Seattle. We said hello and exchanged a few pleasantries and departed. What a strange, unexpected occurrence, particularly in those days. Right then I learned what a small world it was, and later in life would look back on that encounter as the first of many small-world experiences in my life. I also did not realize then that New York City would play such an important role in my future.

After I showed an interest in architecture, my mother introduced me to a fellow in Tacoma, Washington, who was some kind of cousin of ours and was an architect. I went to see his office, and I must say I nearly quit the dream of architecture right there and then. It was a terrible office - dusty and dirty. He was designing fire stations. That was his great claim to fame, and in my opinion, that was just awful. I got away from there as fast as I could, and only because I really liked architecture, continued with my studies at U of W.

My older brother, Hugh, came back from being in the Navy in World War II and really wanted to get into the theater business, which I was operating with my mother. I could go to school during the day, and my mother would be at the theater. Then I could do my studying at night at the theater and help with ticketing and programs and then close the theater at 11 PM or Midnight. So it all worked out very nicely, but I didn’t have any real interest in the theater. I sold my brother my part of the theater, which my dad had left to me. So I used that money, $250 a month, toward paying for school.

With that money and the results of a stupid incident, which happened to me at the U of W School of Architecture, the handwriting was on the wall for me to head to southern California. Looking back, I think I realized how provincial Seattle was at that time and that Los Angeles really was where the action was after World War II. Also, the family had been down for a vacation on the beaches of Los Angeles a year earlier. I must say I enjoyed swimming in the ocean and the nice warm climate.

Back to the stupid incident. It was my fault, but it actually ended up changing the course of my life. I was in a sculpture class. The subject of the assignment was to do whatever we wanted. The following day, a junior professor looked at what I had sculpted, a one-foot high piece that I was very proud of. He said, Have you ever thought about taking up commerce? I don’t generally get physical when I’m upset, but I grabbed him by the lapels, held him off the ground, and slammed him into a corner. After saying a few bad curse words, I dropped him into a crumpled pile. I walked away in a huff, and I thought, You know, I shouldn’t have done that. Needless to say, after a cup of coffee, I went to the office of the dean of the school, who knew my family. I wanted to tell him what I had done, but I had to wait for him for quite a while. He was trying to get out of his office without seeing me, but I kept waiting. He finally agreed to see me, and I told him what I had done to the junior professor and that I was very sorry. I told him also the comment the fellow had made, and he just smiled. I then asked him if he would mind writing a letter of recommendation for me to the University of Southern California School of Architecture. Apparently, his letter was very complimentary and, I think, was one of the reasons they let me in.

I was accepted to USC on a temporary basis, so I knew I was going to have to work hard so they could accept me as a permanent student. At that time, all the fellows came back from the war and could go to the school of their choosing for free because of the G.I. Bill. There were 65 total in my architecture graduating class. The G.I.s really made it tough for me to get through school. They were older and wiser with much more life experience. We all took courses and studied over a five year program, with the goal of taking the state board of exams for a license to practice architecture. The exams were seven days of tests – hour after hour after hour. One day might be the history of architecture, the next on structure, one for the business side of architecture, and another on design. I passed all but two the first time and then passed those the second time. That allowed me to get a state license.

There were 65 people, one of which I think was a woman, who graduated with me. The amazing thing to me, after all the time spent in school, was that there were only six of us, and that included me, that passed the state exams and became architects. Basically, that’s a lot of people who didn’t pass the tests. Whether they didn’t take it, or didn’t want to take it, or took it and didn’t pass, I don’t know, but there were only six of us who became architects, actual licensed architects. It was really surprising. Those other five men who came out of the military got all that education for free because of the G.I. Bill, and each one of those men at one time or another, worked with me. I knew the good ones from my class. One of them, Charles Mac McReynolds, became head of our New York office and did a great job back there. Robert Tyler was another superb one of them who became our chief of design.

Another one of life’s lessons in the small-world category happened during the time I was at USC. One summer, when I was working for Wurdeman and Becket, my uncle Welton’s firm at the time, one of my fraternity brothers from U of W, Ralph Swanson, came down to work in construction in L.A. and split the rent with me at a Gower’s Gulch apartment in Hollywood. We decided one Saturday night to try Hollywood Boulevard, hearing that some pretty nice girls could be found there. The area was far more respectable in those days. Success! Two good looking ladies had drinks with us, but when the subject of getting together the following day arose, all four of us said