In this episode, meet award-winning architect, Kevin Holland, Principal in charge at HMC Architects, AIA national board member, mentor and industry shaper. Kevin joins us to discuss his work creating public and civic spaces, as well as being part of positively impacting the industry from the inside, and helping to usher in new architects joining its ranks.

Architecture was an early decision for Holland, who first encountered that ideal touchstone of the art, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, the summer before entering University of Virginia as an architecture major. “I still remember looking at the first image, and then when I saw that it was built in 1929, I was floored,” he recounts. “I was absolutely convinced that it was a contemporary building built sometime in my lifetime.”

For the last three decades Holland’s been involved in private and public projects, yet at one point made a full-time shift to projects where he could integrate the interests and perspectives of more than a single client. “Sometime in my career the wheels started turning,” says the architect. “I was able to pivot and find some of those project types that enabled me to serve the community at large.”

He’s currently Principal in Charge at HMC Architects in Los Angeles, and shares the ideas driving the agency’s central premise—Design for Good. Particularly how it shapes its work in higher education, K-12, and what they call their “community + culture” practice areas. “For us,” explains Holland, “‘Design for Good’ encapsulates everything we believe about serving the public at large, not just that single client who may have contracted us. All of our projects are very democratic.”

Being part of AIA’s National Board of Directors is just another stop in what’s been another career-long engagement for Holland: helping to advance an industry he loves. “That sense of providing for the person coming behind you has always been there,” he says. It’s a template of service that was passed to him via his grandfather and mother. “They instilled in me through their example of community service,” he points out, which for him includes being part of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), of which he was president, the Dean’s Advisory Board for the Tuskegee University School of Architecture as well as the Dean’s Advisory Board at his alma mater, UVA.

Finally, when asked to recall something that surprised him about architecture back when he first entered the industry, he says it was the role of consultants, those involved with the structural engineering of a project—-and offers a word of advice to new architects. “I think that dance and interacting with other people is the one thing you have to learn,” offers Holland. “You have to learn how much of it is under your control, and how much of it is under someone else’s control. And what is negotiable.”

https://hmcarchitects.com/