San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Opportunity shines on architectural firm
San Antonio is known for its history and culture, and Fisher Heck Architects has helped preserve, restore and reimagine many of the city’s most prominent locales.
That includes the Alamo, San Fernando Cathedral, Maverick Plaza, the Bexar County commissioners’ courtroom, historic houses at Hemisfair, the Menger Hotel, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower.
The bulk of Fisher Heck’s work is in historic preservation and religious architecture, but the firm wants to beef up its higher education projects, President Mark Navarro said. It has renovated facilities at the University of Texas at San Antonio and San Antonio College.
The firm has also worked on projects for Toyota and VIA Metropolitan Transit.
The company’s founders, Lewis Fisher and Jim Heck, met in the 1970s at renowned Texas architect O’Neil Ford’s firm, according to Fisher Heck’s website. Fisher founded his own company in 1982, and Heck joined him several years later, Navarro said.
In 2015, the pair began preparing to hand the reins to Navarro, along with Marc Johnson and David Hannan Jr., both of whom are vice presidents. Fisher and Heck recently retired but continue to work on projects of their choosing at their leisure, Navarro said.
The firm is based in downtown San Antonio and employs 14 people, four of whom joined during the coronavirus pandemic to help manage an influx of projects.
Navarro, a San Antonio native and Texas A&M University alumnus, recently discussed his approach to religious architecture, technology advances in the industry and how the pandemic has affected the firm. The following has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: What first piqued your interest in architecture?
A: People ask, “What was the point you knew?” There wasn’t a specific time or instance. It interested me because there are very few professions or things in the world itself that we have control over that impact people’s lives every day, and architecture is one of those.
From the home that we live in, the office we work in or the park that we play in, you’re experiencing architecture every day and sometimes you don’t even realize it. I wanted the opportunity to impact people’s lives in a positive way through architecture, and I believe Fisher Heck has given me the best opportunity to do that.
I’m the firm lead in religious architecture. After I present concepts to churches, I’ve had people come up to me afterward hugging me and crying. You don’t get that after you design an office building. It can be a really emotional experience, and it’s really gratifying to help people in that way.
Q: Lewis Fisher and Jim Heck started preparing in 2015 to transfer leadership of the firm
to you and your partners. What did that involve?
A: Before becoming partners, we didn’t have exposure to the inner workings of a business. That was one of the biggest things that we needed to learn quick.
We were learning from Jim and Lewis and our business manager, doing a lot of research and reading, and seeing what works.
What is great, what could be improved and how do we move forward in a way where we maintain a great reputation and the high quality work that people come back for?
Something that was difficult to understand before was the current workload for each employee, the backlog and what’s on the horizon. Now we have a good grasp of that, which is beneficial, especially when we’re looking at hiring.
We treat employees as family members. We’ve told them to let us know if there’s anything they think we can improve on, because we want to make sure we’re doing the best we can and sometimes, since we’ve been here for so long, we don’t see some of the deficiencies.
I think something that’s different about our firm versus others in the industry is that it’s pretty typical for architects to work 50 or 60 hours a week, but that’s not how we’ve ever operated. Employees do their work in 40 hours. We respect work-life balance, and because of that our employees also respect us and make sure the work can be done in that amount of time.
I think that’s led to a lot of cohesion of the team. When people come here they stay because they like the atmosphere, the culture and the morale of the firm. We can’t operate as numbers here — these are people.
Q: How do you approach designing a building for a congregation?
A: All churches are different. We tell our clients, “We may be your architect, but the ideas are coming from you. We need to hear your vision first.” Through the experience the firm has gained, we aim to put that vision on paper with recommendations.
There are many types of religious buildings. Everyone thinks of the worship building, but there are administration buildings, education buildings, gymnasiums, day cares. We encourage our clients to start with a master plan.
A major focus is the pedestrian aspect of the master plan and making a cohesive campus. The experience of going from one point to another shouldn’t just be, “I’m going from this room in this building to this room in that building and who cares what happens in between.” We want to create spaces that promote social interaction and activity.
A pathway from point A to B doesn’t just have to be a corridor. It can also be a place where people can gather. So how do we design it in a way that people can use it for multiple functions?
That’s really starting to pay off, especially right now with everything that’s going on and reduced occupancy in buildings. Many of our religious clients are able to use large plazas between buildings for worship and services.
Q: How has the coronavirus pandemic affected the firm?
A: March and April of last year were really scary months for us.
We didn’t think we were going to be hit. We had a good backlog of projects. We hadn’t heard anything from our clients, so we just kept pushing forward. Then the first call comes in about a project going on hold. And then another one, another one, another one.
At the lowest point, we could barely put 10 hours a week on a time sheet. It was bad. No one knew what was going to happen or what the economic impact would be. There were difficult discussions: “What are we going to do? We only have so much emergency funds and we don’t see when this is going to get better.”
But our employees are a part of the family, and we can’t let our family down. They expect us to be able to find work and put it in front of them for them to work on, and we appreciate the hard work they do. They were doing their part and we needed to do our part as well.
We maintained our full staff, full salary.
A month later or so some of the projects that had been on hold came back to life. Not all of them — we’re still waiting for some over a year later, but they will come back. Then new projects came along, which was mind-boggling to me. Who wants to build in a pandemic?
Our staff were working extremely hard. We were hitting deadlines, but barely, and it was getting to a point where we didn’t want the quality of work that we’re known for to take a hit. Once again we had a difficult discussion. “Are we crazy to hire in a pandemic when six weeks ago we didn’t have any work?”
But we hired two people and we’re so happy that we brought them on. Months later it still feels like we’re trying to catch up, and over the last two months we hired two more people.
There’s no explanation other than our reputation. If people are going to do work during this time and commit hard-earned money toward projects, they want to make sure that the firm that’s going to do that work can provide high quality work. We are very fortunate for all of them.
Q: How has technology affected your work?
A: We used to work only in 2D when drafting, but about 10 years ago a 3D program came out. It was different and it was going to take a long time to learn, but we made the commitment to try it because we thought it was going be the future and what was going to keep us relevant. It’s hard for clients to visualize 2D, and now we’re able to provide 3D images to them.
That’s been the last decade, but now things are evolving even more. It’s not just about providing 3D perspectives to clients. It’s about how they can experience a building before it’s built. We’ve used virtual reality on some projects. In the same program we use for that, we can also do full high definition renderings and animations.
When we started working remotely during the pandemic, we didn’t have access to big printers at our houses. With a lot of work, especially when we’re designing a drawing, you need to put a pencil to paper.
We’re looking into digital sketch pads. We can draw digitally on our computer in the same way that we can on paper, and we’re saving paper. It’s a lot easier to organize that way. You make your changes and your design and send it to other team members and they can work on it. That’s something that we’re going to implement very soon.
We’ve looked into drones as well. Being able to see sites from above can help clients understand the site. It’s helpful during construction because we can get a more holistic view of what’s going on and also for assessments of existing buildings. We work on a lot of historic buildings downtown. How can those drones help us understand the condition of those buildings so we don’t have to bill a client for a cherry-picker for us to go up there? That’s cost savings for the client.