KNOW YOUR PRODUCTS ARCHITECT PROFILE
Tis Architect Connects with Metal
Brian Titus sees architecture as a way of life By Mark Robins, Senior Editor
As a child growing up in Peoria, Ill., Brian Titus, LEED AP BD+C, AIA, NCARB, would take Sunday drives with his family to special places in Illinois. On one visit to see his aunt and uncle, who were farmers, they stopped in to see the John Deere & Co. headquarters, a Corten steel, metal and glass building in Moline, Ill.
The experience changed his life. “After seeing it, I knew I was going to be an
architect and I was never going to change my mind,” he says. Not only did he not change his mind, Titus has gone on to design several successful and creative metal-based architectural projects in his 25 years of national and international practice as designer, project architect and principal. He is currently director of de- sign and vice president for the Atlanta office of LEO A DALY, an internationally renowned architecture, planning, engineering, interior design and program management firm.
EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE Titus received his Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from University of Illinois in Urbana-Cham- paign, Ill. His Master of Architecture degree is from Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. Growing up in Illinois, he was exposed to architecture at a very young age. “Chicago has always been a leading city for archi- tecture,” he says. “The Sears Tower and the Hancock building were being built when I was a kid, and at the time they were the tallest buildings in the world.” At Clemson, Titus spent a semester studying
abroad in Italy, which he calls “a wonderful experi- ence.” He started working for architects when he was in school during the summers. He also worked in between undergraduate and graduate school. The first job Titus worked on where metal was
a factor was right after graduate school. “It was a library and administration building for a technical college in Pendleton, S.C.,” he says. “It’s all metal. This was in 1987 and metal panels have evolved a lot since then. The metal panels used back then are not the metal panels used today. Back then, metal panels
www.metalarchitecture.com July 2012 METAL ARCHITECTURE 53
signified the future; they were a futuristic building material. Metal can be used in a lot of different ways. But using metal on the exterior like that was a very contemporary thing to do at the time.”
JAPAN AND KUALA LUMPUR After his South Carolina experience, Titus went to work in Tokyo for a year for Ichiro Ebihara Architects and Associates. “At that time, Ichiro Ehibara was the oldest living architect in Tokyo,” he says. “His firm played a large role in the rebuilding of Tokyo and Japan after the war. “Tokyo is a very different environment to work in. The scale is different from anywhere else I’ve been
and I’ve been to many different places. The rever- ence for creativity and design in Tokyo is different than here in the United States. People photograph buildings all the time here in the United States. If you took a picture of a building in Japan, you could have someone from inside the building run outside and tell you, ‘You can’t photograph this building because it’s a work of art!’ It’s a very different way of looking at and respecting creativity.” After Japan, Titus went to work for Kevin Roche,
John Dinkeloo and Associates in Hamden, Conn. “It is a successor firm to Eero Saarinen,” he says. “Eero is a historic figure in architecture and so are Kevin and John.” Ironically, it was Saarinen who designed the John Deere & Co. headquarters building, his initial inspiration to become an architect. “As a kid, I had no idea I would later go and work for the firm that designed that building,” Titus says. A noteworthy design project that he collaborated
on while working for Roche is the Maxis Tower in Kua- la Lumpur, Malaysia. Maxis Tower, or Menara Maxis in the Malay language, is an office skyscraper that houses the headquarters of Maxis Communications and Tanjong Plc Group of Companies. This 50-floor high-rise building, which stands next to the Petronas Towers, features an aluminum and glass-clad façade, as well as metal panels and metal awnings.
TOP: The interior columns along the glass wall of the Georgia Gwinnett College Library in Lawrenceville, Ga., are wrapped with metal to make it more prominent in open space. BOTTOM: The library’s metal panels are part of the campus palate.
Rion Rizzo, Creative Sources Photography Inc.
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