Gary Wayne Clements
Gary Clements’ specialty in historic architecture helped build his firm from the ground up
As an architect, Gary Clements is a throwback in every sense of the word. A multi-talented professional in an age of hyper-specialization, his firm, Clements & Associates Architecture, handles a broad range of architectural projects from housing and religious buildings to medical facilities, colleges and correctional complexes.
It’s not only apt to describe Clements as old school but a mantle he welcomes personally and professionally. When the hallmark projects of a 40-year career include some of the most historically significant structures in the state, you have to have a well-honed appreciation for things that withstand the whims of fad and fashion.
“When I was in college, you almost couldn’t even take a computer course,” says Clements, who later this month will receive Preserve Arkansas’ Lifetime Achievement Award. “And look where it is now, the computer thinks for you.”
Clements has kept up with the technology that powers his profession, of course, but there’s something about his practice that recalls a different time. Perhaps it’s that his offices are housed in a restored antique house on Main Street in North Little Rock’s Argenta neighborhood. Maybe it’s the cache of rolled-up architectural drawings and maps that dominate one corner of his office, or the many photos on the wall of historic buildings the firm has saved from Father Time’s scythe.
Or it might just be the aura Clements himself gives off, of one who has been at this long enough to have seen some things, yet still excited at learning something new.
“I read anything I can pertaining to Arkansas history. I find it fascinating,” he says. “I’ve had the opportunity to deal with lots of committed preservation people who have a common goal of trying to save this little school building or court house, or this little whatever. I’ve met so many good people and I wear good tires off my car running up and down the highway going all over the state.
“We work in towns like Selma and Smyrna, Emmet and Snowball. Places where people may have seen a sign, but they never go there. And you go in and you find the most gorgeous church that was painstakingly designed. They had a lot of money to build it and now the money’s gone, but there’s this building people are trying to preserve. It’s really rewarding to be able do that.”
“When I talk to him about a problem at this building, it’s very clear he has a way of seeing things that make a tremendous difference in the outcome of what needs to be done,” says the Rev. Jim McDonald of St. Paul Episcopal Church in Batesville, a client and friend who has
known Clements since both were in college together. “At this church, we’ve used him to help solve problems that have been in existence for decades and he’s made a tremendous difference.
“I love old architecture as well and when I’ve been with him and seen him look at buildings and talk about what he’s seeing, it helps broaden my perspective and appreciation for the art that has gone into the creation of historic buildings.”
MATHEMATICS IN THE MORNING
Clements was born to Hurschel and Billie Jean Clements, the youngest of their three children, and grew up in Austin, Arkansas. His mother was a teacher but every other shoot of his family tree was rooted in the earth with lives spent bringing things out of it, as farmers and tradesmen.
“My dad was an electrician and my whole family — uncles, grandfather and all — were in the construction industry. They were carpenters, plumbers and welders,” he says. “Going a step farther back than that, they all came out farmers through the Depression and whatnot.”
Clements didn’t want for much growing up, but that only happened as a result of concerted effort by his parents. What the family had, they had because of their frugality not largesse, a lesson drummed daily into Clements and his two older sisters.
“My parents were very conservative financially because things were limited back then,” he says. “You only had two pairs of shoes, Sunday shoes and school shoes or work shoes. I was taught to be conservative in spending. I was taught to save money. It was a good background. My parents were very good parents.”
Despite his mother’s profession and the emphasis placed on the kids concerning education, Clements was indifferent to his studies. Everything captivated him more than schoolwork, including an artistic interest which he indulged through music, playing trombone in the school band and also learning piano. As high school wore on, he assumed his future would lie in construction like his relatives and in a way he was right.
“I didn’t want to go to college, I anticipated going into construction just like everybody else in my family,” he says. “But my dad really wanted me to do better and he persuaded me not to do that. He thought that it was too hard of a lifestyle.
“When I got into high school, I got more interested in buildings and how they could look differently. So, I got interested in drafting and I took drafting my senior year in high school.”
At the urging of his father, Clements enrolled in Foothills Vocational-Technical School (now Arkansas State University-Searcy) after graduation. During his year at the school, his interest was accelerated by Cabot architect Merle Lewis, who hired Clements on weekends.
“He had a six-acre yard and he hired me to do his yard work, which included chainsaws and building fences,” he says. “Sometimes he would let me go in and mop the floors in the studio, and I’d see all those young interns in there working with pen and ink on mylar. I just was intrigued by all of that.”
The exposure tripped a switch and after completing one year at Foothills Vo-Tech, Clements headed for Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas architecture program. There, he got his first rude awakening about his mediocre academic career.
“I had to realize I hadn’t taken my studies quite as seriously in high school as I should have,” he says. “I was a little behind in trigonometry. I had taken trig, I had taken algebra and the last couple years in high school you were given some additional opportunities. But as soon as I could get away from that, I had quit taking it.
“My very first semester, I was given a 7:30 a.m. class that combined algebra and trig together, five days a week. That was cruel. Mathematics at 7:30 in the morning was really discouraging. By midsemester I was trying to remember if I had actually been to class the week before. It was painful.”
RENOVATING THE CAPITOL
Clements weathered his tough first year and then some, graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1981. But the economic times were not kind to the architecture profession, forcing him to start his career in neighboring Oklahoma.
“The first years of the double-digit recession, ’81, ’82, there were no jobs to be found here,” he says. “I had interviewed in Tulsa and they had all those oil funds so they were still hanging in there, so was Denver and Dallas. I didn’t really want to go to those places. I had, like, four offers in Oklahoma City and I ended up taking, whether it was smart or not, the lowest-paying job of them all, because of Robert F. Reed. He was a prairie-style architect there and he had received lots of awards.”
All told, Clements spent four years with Oklahoma firms, learning the craft and gaining valuable experience. In 1985, with oil money drying up across the state, he decided it was time to come home to Arkansas. A call to his former mentor Merle Lewis revealed no in-house vacancies, but some leads, including Burt Taggart, founder of Taggart Architects in North Little Rock, who’d just landed a commission for renovation work on the Arkansas state Capitol.
“I started on the Tuesday after Labor Day, 1985,” Clements says. “I got into town the week before that, interviewed, started the following Tuesday. That morning about 10 a.m. they took me to the Capitol into the basement of the building. I thought this is a sign that life’s going to be good.”
“Gary was just conscientious,” Taggart says. “He was the kind of employee I was looking for, somebody who would do the best he could and not take the easy way out. Just my kind of guy. He had this diligence, that was really the quality that he had, his stick-to-it-iveness. He just stayed with it, was responsible for it, and did not disappoint me at all.”
The Taggart job into which Clements was hired morphed from 6 months to 12 years; overall, his work with the state Capitol ran three times that long. One restoration project begat another from the historic Supreme Court Chamber and House of Representatives Chamber to the Senate Committee Room and Capitol dome itself.
“We just recently finished restoration of the Treasury [office], so, that was what? Thirty-six years at the Capitol,” Clements says. “And in-between the Capitol projects, for which the secretary of state is responsible for the exterior and the grounds and the hallways, mechanical and electrical, all those other suites are the responsibility of the constitutional officers of the House and Senate or bureaus or whatever. Over time, I have worked for all of them.”
The long list of projects makes for a compelling calling card, as no building epitomizes the state’s history and heritage, or is more visible, than the gleaming state Capitol, sparkling on the western edge of downtown Little Rock. The work itself, on the other hand, was hardly glamorous or without hiccups.
“Well, nobody realized all the asbestos that was in there and there goes the budget and this, that and the other,” he says. “The House of Representatives back then, boy, that was a pit. The ceilings had been lowered; they were nine feet high when really, they were 15 feet high. And this was all over the building.”
Clements not only grew as an architect through these projects, but the Capitol work pushed him in other ways, too.
“I was really timid; I didn’t speak publicly,” he says. “We had a meeting once with the House of Representatives committee over the facilities where we’d prepared all these drawings for how we’re going to redo this portion of the House. I show up, I’m looking good, and Burt [Taggart] is nowhere to be found. We hung around and hung around and they finally said, ‘OK, Gary. It’s your turn. You’re going to have to present this.’ Scared me to death.
“But it was the first time I realized these people are just people. They’re not here to destroy me, they want to hear what I’ve got to say. After that, I felt like people were actually listening to me. I mean, I was obviously intimidated by everybody, but over time that grew to where I no longer had those concerns. I finally got to where I could speak in public, because I realized what I wanted to say was relevant.
“By the way, about the time I finished that presentation, Burt came barging in, wearing sweats,” Clements laughs. “He had gotten sidetracked and forgot about it.”
BARELY MAKING IT
By the mid-1990s, Clements had risen to the role of vice president at Taggart Architects but found himself increasingly longing for a new challenge. In 1997 he hung his own shingle, a moment of note only to him and his dogs Lucy and Ethel at the time. The rest of the world, including the kinds of clients that propel a firm’s fortunes, had yet to discover him.
“When I first left, the work I had lined up was historic preservation work,” he says. “I didn’t leave with the intentions of doing nothing but historic preservation work, but it was right after North Little Rock had gotten this historic district established and I was doing work for the Argenta Community Development Corporation.
“Unfortunately, unless you’re working at the state Capitol or you’re working at some federal historic building or county courthouse in a heavily populated county, there’s not a lot of money in historic preservation. There are grant programs, but what you end up with is every project you work on is phased. The Shiloh Museum of Ozark History’s [Shiloh Meeting Hall] in Springdale, the oldest building in Springdale, we’ve worked on that for 13 years, and it’s just a two-story wood frame building.”
Funds soon began to run low and Clements was feeling discouraged. So, he called his mentor, Burt Taggart, who’d taken an early retirement. Taggart gave him some advice that brought Clements’ chin up, then did that one better a week later.
“He called me back the next week and he said, ‘Gary, would you be interested in a $10 million project in Florida?’” Clements says, still incredulous. “Well, it’s just me by myself at that time, but I’m almost out of money so yeah, of course I could do that.
“That was 23 years ago. I don’t know what that would be today, but it was a big project. It was a sanctuary for a
Baptist church in St. Petersburg that housed 800 people. On the floor plan it looked like Battlestar Galactica. It
was round and had buttresses and it was like a cathedral.”
The successful project infused Clements’ firm with
operating capital and provided the kind of visibility that brought in more work from a variety of industries. In time,
he’d increase clients organically with successively larger projects, today numbering 3040 per year.
“Architecture is not an easy business to go into, but there is a methodology. You do little projects, then when the big ones come up, they’ll give that one to you, too. It just takes time,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of work at the Little Rock Air Force Base, hundreds of projects out there. It’s a steady stream. Now, that’s very utilitarian, but we make a good living at it which helps subsidize the preservation work that doesn’t make much. That’s kind of the crazy concept.”
Along the way, Clements has lent his expertise to various organizations and professional groups. North Little Rock’s Main Street organization and Historic District Commission, as well as longtime service to Preserve Arkansas, just scratch the surface of his involvement.
Today, he has come full circle from the kid steeped in his family’s origins to the man enraptured with the people and places that make Arkansas what it is. His professional success indulges his fascination in historical structures — many well over a century old, some closer to 150 years old — and his drive to preserve them for several generations more.
“If I do a really good job, or my firm does a really good job on a historic building, you shouldn’t see any sign of us at all. It should be just the building,” he says. “Now, rarely do you put a building exactly back like it was, because they want electricity and heating and cooling. That means you’ve got to modify it, otherwise you just have a museum piece. It has to be modified so it can function, because if it doesn’t function, it’s not going to survive and it’s going to be gone.”