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Kenneth Jay Hirsch, AIA
Hirsch Architects, Inc., Boca Raton
While in high school, I took an aptitude test
that predicted my career path. At that moment, I chose to be an
architect. I had no role models, virtually no one to look to for
advice, and no one to mentor me. I was shy, introverted, and
intimidated by my prospects for the future. My greatest strength
was a drive to succeed. Even though I grew up in a poor family, I
had the determination to work my way through the University of
Southern California School of Architecture and establish myself as
an architect. After a series of moves and a new family, in 1973 I
found myself in south Florida with the opportunity of starting an
architectural practice.
By 1982, I had stepped into a leadership role in the local AIA
component. This was the beginning of my transformation as an
architect interacting with the community. The local architects in
Boca Raton initiated a community-design charrette with the faculty
and students of the University of Florida School of Architecture.
To my astonishment, I saw architects listening to animated
residents, elected officials articulating their dreams for the
downtown area, and faculty facilitating the process. The charrette
was a breakthrough for me. I wanted to become a facilitator but had
no access to express it.
It was not until 1989 that the access to the facilitator role
appeared. It was during a business leadership retreat keynote
address, where the speaker expressed the possibility for a 200-year
vision. The Boca Raton charrette looked out only 20 years. The
thought of thinking about 200 years captivated me even though I had
no verbal tools to express the enlightenment. After taking a
workshop offered by the keynote speaker, I discovered a body of
knowledge that had been blocked from my consciousness. It was no
longer about buildings, design, or urban form; it was about
interacting with other human beings.
My Organizational Development training emerged from several
diverse arenas. A two-week church leadership training program was a
journey through a structured methodology of facilitating a vision
for an organization and creating measurable goals. Another
week-long corporate training program gave me tools for team
building, focusing on personal wants and identifying breakthrough
strategies to overcome obstacles. A third “vision to
action” training program pulled many of my fragmented
experiences together into a comprehensive professional
discipline.
I took the real estate collapse of the early nineties as an
opening to explore visioning as a consulting service. I offered to
facilitate visioning workshops for organizations that sensed their
transforming nature. As a regional volunteer for a national church
facilities program, I developed a two-day visioning workshop where
the congregation expressed its own 20-year vision, an empowering
process for the participants. The Florida AIA board of directors
agreed to a two-day visioning workshop that to this day has had a
profound effect on those who experienced it.
In 1995, my next training milestone occurred when I enrolled in a
cutting-edge professional coaching program. In a national seminar
at the International Coach Federation, I came face to face with the
distinctions of consultant, facilitator, and coach. The consultant
is the one with the answers, the facilitator is the one that
administers a process, and the coach helps break through where you
are stuck. I discovered that architects can leverage the outcome of
community projects by using the skills of consultant, facilitator,
and coach.
My experience in working with communities has revealed something
puzzling: some leaders have no vision. There is joy in helping
people express their vision. The expression of a vision for 200
years is becoming commonplace. It’s not about what it will be;
it’s about what you want it to be. Expressing what you want
for the future influences the choices you make today.
My vision is to expand the global possibilities for visioning.
What has taken me 40 years to learn could be condensed into a
curriculum for all built-environment professionals. Future leaders
will be skilled facilitators empowering others to express their
vision of the future. I challenge all architects to express what
they want for the future and to have that vision prominently placed
as a daily reminder of where they are headed. The larger the
vision, the more powerfully it pulls you into the future.
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