KNOW YOUR PRODUCTS ARCHITECT PROFILE
Back to the Drawing Board
An innate sense of spatial balance and a love for sketching have made this architect a success
By Mark Robins, Senior Editor
When interns start at his architectural firm, Maziar Behrooz, AIA, gives them a blank sketch book and tells them, “you need to fill this up by the time you leave here and you need to keep getting new sketch books.” Behrooz is a firm believer in the systemized link between hand and eye and mind, emphasizing this advanced system can produce things that computers can’t come close to.
“One thing I always tell my interns is anybody
can make a beautiful computer rendering, but not everyone can make a beautiful sketch,” he says. “It allows you to explore ideas in different ways.” Maximizing this mindset, for the past 25 years Behrooz’s ideas have produced beautiful sketches, which have evolved into dynamic designs and suc- cessful structures. He has thought this way early on. “I’ve always
known I’ve wanted to be an architect and I can’t do anything else,” he says. “And I’m very happy about that because my mind works like an architect’s mind. As a kid it’s the only thing I could imagine myself being, and I’ve always been good at draw- ing and geometry. I’ve always been able to think very spatially.” After growing up in Teh-
ran and graduating from high school in Massachusetts, he went to New Orleans to study at Tulane Univer- sity, where he earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in architecture in the 1980s. Graduate level stud- ies for two years happened at the Cornell Architecture School in Ithaca, N.Y. It was at the Tulane School of Archi- tecture where he interned at
32 METAL ARCHITECTURE November 2012
www.metalarchitecture.com
an office geared to New Orleans projects, which was run by the Dean of Architecture Ron Filson. “It was interesting to switch from theoretical and hypothetical projects in class, to real projects that were to be built in New Orleans,” he says.
EXTENDED VIENNA VACATION In the late 1980s, he traveled to Europe for what was originally only supposed to be a one-week stay in Vienna, Austria, but wound up staying longer when he landed his first real job as an architect there. “After a week of wandering around and see- ing the town, I thought it was such a beautiful place for an architect, that I thought about working there,” he says. “I looked up architect offices and listings. I had my portfolio, found a job with a firm that needed an extra body and my one-week trip became a one- year-long journey.” “I think in Europe, metal, steel and alumi-
num and other non-lumber-based products are used more in commercial and residential build- ings than they are here in the United States,” he adds. “There isn’t as much wood in Germany and Austria, and the use of steel and wrought iron in Europe goes back centuries. In the Vienna office, metal work was commonly worked into the designs throughout the buildings. I saw more aluminum and
steel windows than wood ones in some of the cit- ies I visited in Germany and France.”
ARCHITECT ON HIS OWN After working as a junior architect at a few firms, Behrooz struck out on his own to expand the scope of his projects. Maziar Behrooz Architecture was founded in the 1990s in Manhattan and established an office in East Hampton in 1996. His firm has created a variety of projects and buildings from sus- tainably designed single-family homes, to afford- able housing and community-based projects. His firm’s designs have won three AIA Peconic Awards and a Green Building Council Award, among others. But this success wasn’t easy at first. “I had no idea what it would take to have your
own business,” he says. “I had worked in different offices and I thought opening up your own office would continue to be like that. But running a business is a very different thing besides just being an archi- tect. I was absolutely unprepared for it; I dove into it really. If I had known all of the issues, problems, risks and roadblocks you hit when you are running a busi- ness, I might have hesitated. But not knowing what the problems are allowed me to go out on my own and put up a shingle and start getting my own work. Of course, the first few years were a little harder, but eventually things smoothed out.” One thing that has helped Behrooz success-
fully facilitate projects is his understanding of his clients and their needs. “One thing that my clients have told me that they really like is that I draw by hand,” he says. “Of course, we do use comput- ers too. Clients really enjoy seeing me and other people in my office sketch ideas as we discuss projects on notepads or on a board. They really get engaged with the product, with us and our work. It may seem like a minor thing, but in this day and age, when everyone talks about computer render- ings, 3-D modeling and BIM, which we do use to a great extent, it’s good to hear that people react to that very basic architectural tool of drawing with a pencil on paper.”
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