Dietrich Wieland and Rich Mitchell outside the RiverEast Center (Mackenzie)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
It began in 1960 as a sole proprietorship: Tom Mackenzie, Consulting Engineer. A West Point graduate, he'd spent years building buildings and rifle ranges and dams for the Army Corps of Engineers, then became the City of Portland's lead structural engineering consultant. Now, as the Kennedy administration ushered in a new era, Mackenzie decided to venture out on his own.
He didn't stay a sole proprietor for long, though. By 1962 he had an office downtown at 10th and Stark. By 1968, it was a multi-person structural engineering firm with a new name: Mackenzie Engineering, and had moved to occupy an old house on Southeast Abernethy Street. That same year, architect Rick Saito joined the firm as a drafting intern, and in 1977 a separate architecture firm was founded: Mackenzie/Saito & Associates. By 1996, those companies came under one umbrella: Group Mackenzie, provider of architecture and engineering services. For the past six years, 'Group' has been omitted and the firm has simply been known as Mackenzie.
But across those names and service offerings, the firm now celebrating its 60th anniversary has been part of a wide range of projects.
Mackenzie's portfolio includes a large number of fire and police stations all over Oregon and the Northwest — including in my hometown of McMinnville. There are also many industrial buildings: warehouses, distribution centers, office parks. Grocery stores and retail outlets are plentiful too, as are parks and small sports stadiums, medical clinics and pet hospitals and schools. You might say that many of these are not so much high-profile landmarks but rather the bread-and-butter architecture of our cities and suburbs. Yet these projects are well built and efficiently built, and the combined offerings of engineering and architecture make Mackenzie relatively uncommon.
Most of all, though, as I talked recently with outgoing (retiring) firm president Rich Mitchell and new president Dietrich Wieland, I was struck by the culture of the firm. Mackenzie is a place that lacks ego and doubles down on giving its people opportunity. That's something any number of firms might say. But the degree to which it's given importance at this firm is reflected in the fact that Mackenzie enjoys a higher retention rate than most of its competitors. Wieland, for instance, has spent his entire 23-year career at the firm, and his experience is not uncommon. But it's perhaps Mitchell, who took over leadership of Mackenzie in 2009 but has been there far longer, who has most made a culture of opportunity at Mackenzie a reality — well, him and the founders.
"This is a service company," Tom Mackenzie said in a 2015 video interview. "You really want to serve rather than create your own monuments."
When I first met Rich Mitchell just over 20 years ago, he was a member of the board of the directors for the American Institute of Architects' Portland chapter while I was working there. His main focus as a board member was bolstering what was known as the Intern Development Program: helping more young architecture grads get ready for license exams. That sense of wanting to invest in young talent only continued as he assumed the president's role at Mackenzie.
KOIN Center lobby renovation (Josh Partee)
Below is an edited version of my recent conversation with Mitchell and Wieland.
Portland Architecture: Rich, you're retiring after just over a decade as Mackenzie's president. If you could, what might you tell the 2009 version of yourself? Or to put it another way, what has been a key to the firm's success over that time?
Rich Mitchell: Certainly there were things that happened I didn’t expect. There are challenges or situations you have to navigate. But I had a kind of road map from Tom and others that served me individually and the company as well. I came into that role at Mackenzie with a strong passion about building people. I’ve always felt that the industry and certainly our firm can be the best it can be if the people are put in the position to be the best they can. It’s not an individual thing. It’s been a focus on mentoring, coaching, teaching, developing people. That was my platform. That was my passion. And that’s really what I spent my entire tenure on. It’s helping people spread their wings as far as they can: to challenge themselves, guide them, mentor them, coach them. I felt that if we took that approach, people and the company would flourish.
If you ask me what the success of Mackenzie has been in that time, it’s that people have come to the company and they’ve thrived. It’s all them. Sure, I’ve coached them. I’ve fostered a sense of mentoring and coaching my entire career. But those people have risen up. And frankly, Dietrich is one of those.
I appreciate the fact that you're focused on your team and your process more than the buildings themselves. It seems uncommon to me. How do you see that in context of the industry?
Mitchell: You’re right. It’s probably rare. That’s not why I selected that path. It’s more of a DNA thing or a passion thing. It seems to me that to succeed at the highest level of anything, whether it’s sports, whether it’s producing athletic wear, whether it’s in the high tech industry or a medical clinic or an architectural practice, it comes down to people, and if you can take everyone and give them the chance to blossom, so that their potential is maximized, that’s a big thing.
I felt confident that one thing would enable the other: that investing in people was exactly what you needed to invest in great work. I knew Mackenzie would evolve to doing more sophisticated design work, being able to produce broader kinds of projects within the market—that we would diversify, that Mackenzie would mature and grow and develop, in ways that look like a high performing, progressive design and engineering practice.
It’s just something I’ve felt passionate from the beginning. You can succeed at the highest levels if you create a culture of professional development in any industry you're in.
Could you talk about how your personnel is divided up — how you arrange teams? There are a lot of ways to decide who works on what project and how the company is organized.
Dietrich Wieland: there’s fundamentally a tendency in firms, and Mackenzie to an extent, to organize teams by market sector. There’s value in that because you get a level of expertise in a certain subject matter. Although we’re fundamentally organized that way, I think it’s naturally evolved to be organized more by relationship. You still have those market sector leaders and subject matter expertise, but you start organizing teams based more on client relationship. A client doing a lot of industrial work might go into another type. You build with a client over time. You still bring in certain team members to meet the knowledge need, but then you’ve also got that conduit of a relationship[p across projects. They’ve got a point of contact. That’s what I’ve enjoyed. I think that what allows, going back to Rich’s point on mentoring: it provides some variety to a team within their workload. There’s a caution of pigeonholing people. How do they grow and learn?
Mitchell: Even though we have these different areas of specialty, we also have a culture, and we’ve tried to maintain this, where it really is whoever can rise to the occasion, you have the stage. It’s not like the principal or the lead designer or somebody more established dominates the project. It really is more about who can help us win. Sometimes that’s somebody that’s been out of school three months. Sometimes it’s somebody who has been with the company 20 years. And with that culture, you get people taking risks thinking: ‘I’m going to try this,’ or, ‘I’ve only been here six months but I’m going to speak up.’
Wieland: That’s why I’m still at Mackenzie after 23 yeas. It’s the only firm I’ve ever worked at. That’s what’s drawn me to want to stay and continue. I can’t think of a time I didn’t feel supported. Even those early years in the career. Or sometimes take an opportunity and ask for permission later.
What can you tell me about Tom Mackenzie and Rick Saito?
Mitchell: Tom really focused on client service: on listening to the client. What is it that the client is looking for? How can we add value to the client’s needs through design? The other aspect was Tom was this West Point grad, military guy. His focus was to work hard but he also understood that you need to have fun doing whatever you’re doing. Tom was the first to support things like the Mackenzie running team, which today does Hood to Coast or back in the day did the Cascade Run-off. Lots of other things: baseball, softball. Tom was athletic, physical. He wanted to create a culture where people enjoyed being with each other. And employee families were also important. Tom knew the person he saw at the office, but the other half of that person’s team was at home. So he developed several employee benefit initiatives such as a college scholarship program for the children of employees, and a profit-sharing plan was put in place.
Tom Mackenzie and Rick Saito (Mackenzie)
Rick Saito was the one that diversified the company, taking it from structural engineering into full-on integrated design and engineering practice. Tom’s original clients loved him so much, but they knew that architects were the prime consultants on their projects. The clients appreciated the drive, the problem-solving of Tom Mackenzie and Mackenzie Engineering so much that they said, ‘Is there some way you could add architecture? Then clients wouldn’t have to hire these other architects, and Mackenzie wouldn’t have to sub-consult. So enter Rick Saito. He and Tom saw eye to eye on so many things: the family part, the work-hard-play hard. Rick was also just very driven. He would seek excellence at the highest level.
Is that what began to expand the company's portfolio?
Mitchell: Definitely. When we were just an engineering firm and sub-consulting, we were doing industrial projects and manufacturing and warehouse facilities. Enter Rick and we’re starting to get into people-oriented spaces: educational facilities, offices. Then Rick got to a point where he said, ‘If we’re going to take the next step, we probably need to bring in from the outside some other voices, because we’re getting to an area where we’ve grown as far as we can with the clients we have. I want to diversify and bring in some others’. Up to that point, Mackenzie had grown by Rick and Tom bringing in very young people and then growing them.
Rick got to the point in ’88, ’89, where he started to hire experienced people from outside firms, and that was a first. That’s when I came in, I had eight years of experience in other firms, Dick Spies came from BOOR/A [now Bora], and Tamio Fukuyama came from GBD. He started bringing in people from the outside that would mix with people on the inside and take us in a stronger direction. That pivot really launched us.
Albany Fire Station (Mackenzie)
The first thing that strikes me about Mackenzie's project list is the breadth of it: education, health care, infrastructure, offices. But I also noticed the firm has really done a lot of fire stations all over the state. Maybe it's just the kid in me, but I'd love to hear about the particular challenge of designing fire stations — beyond the pole, of course.
Mitchell: There’s several building blocks that go into a fire station. The space we see the most is the “garage”, otherwise known as the apparatus bay. That’s where you see the big beautiful red trucks when the bay doors are open. That’s usually the majority of the space. But feeding that is a large number of rooms to store equipment and clothing, and when they need to repair their vehicles. The fire district mechanics are often Nascar-level pit crew types with full-service shops, tools, and equipment needed to make any and all repairs to the vehicles. There’s the rooms and areas to support the firefighters as they gear up and de-contaminate when they come back: soot all over the helmets, masks, coats, boots. So there’s rooms to support all that maintenance of the gear. That together is maybe 60 percent. The other 40 percent will include offices for the chief and assistant chief, training rooms, etc.. Yes you’ll have sleeping quarters, and staff spaces to unwind, because they work in multi-day shifts. And in headquarter stations, there often is a community requirement. Sometimes districts bring the public in to conduct first aid classes. In the fire station we did here on Bainbridge island, the main headquarters functions as sort of an urgent care facility. People come up to the fire station thinking they may be having a heart attack, and they want help. There are facilities designed into this station that medics can use to help people urgently.
RiverEast Center (Mackenzie)
When I think of Mackenzie, I also think of renovations like the RiverEast Center at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge, where the firm has also long had its headquarters. The design really did a good job of cutting into the old masonry shell of that warehouse and giving it transparency without obliterating the original. But then there's also the Clay Creative building, on the site of the burned-down Taylor Electric building. I love how you maintained some of the graffiti from the burned-out building shell. Could you talk about that?
Wieland: I remember that building catching fire. It was on the news. Our build-out on RiverEast was underway at the time. I remember seeing the smoke and worrying it was our building. All that was left of Taylor Electric was the floor slab and the exterior walls. It just sort of sat there, and it became a favorite of taggers and graffiti artists. I actually had the opportunity to participate in the design of the new building there twice. We designed the building initially around 2008, 2009. But because of the Great Recession, the project went away. Then Killian Pacific got involved and we had the opportunity to work on it again. By that time, it had become an iconic place for graffiti. People were breaking in for wedding photos. When we took the project on it was like, ‘How can we retain some of this?’ We kind of laughed at the irony of designing a mass timber building at the site, given the concerns that code people used to have about fire safety.
That's right. It was a relatively early mass timber building, right?
Wieland: Yeah at the time, that was pre-CLT [cross-laminated timber]. It was a laminated timber building. It was by far one of the more aggressive ones in Portland. It’s as much about working with the jurisdiction on understanding how to interpret and review mass timber as it applies to the code. I think it had a lot to do in terms of the city understanding how to complete that process. Killian made a calculated bet that they could offer something unique in the market. Sure enough, they were on the front end of that and the building leased up quickly. Now you’re seeing it all over the place.
Clay Creative (Mackenzie)
So what does this 60th anniversary mean to you?
Wieland: I don’t want to lose sight of the narrative on people. I like that quote that the culture of a company is in the heart of its people. But also important: You heard Rich say people a lot and me say relationships, and when I think of relationships it’s also our clients. For me, getting into this profession to do projects, I’m still interested in that as much as the next architect. But for me it’s become about relationships: with our clients, our brokers, our partners. If I were to sum things up, the word would be 'relationships.'
Maybe that speaks to Portland and its collaborative culture. We're not quite as cut-throat as other cities' design and architecture communities.
Wieland: Absolutely, and now more than ever. As architects, we’re a competitive bunch, but we also know how to come together. I’ve got friends at a lot of firms around town. What’s been really exciting to see is how the firms have tried to support each other through this. We’re all struggling with the same challenges. There’s a lot of collaboration. I have a text group where we talk a few days a week: how are you doing this? How are you doing that? We have a common interest in seeing the city get back to work. That camaraderie is really coming out right now.
Advertisements
Comments