My firm recently was awarded a project in Tulsa, OK (see, "the big Driller" on the left). When the marketing team was putting together the proposal and told me that I would be the Project Architect if we were to get the contract, I joked about how I couldn't wait to work on a project in Oklahoma, so I could go to the land of The Flaming Lips. Well, we got it, and I found myself on Tuesday, frantically finishing up some plans so that I could be ready to leave for the airport when the car came at 3:30PM.
There had been talk the week before. Tulsa? Really? A project in The Middle? Jimmy had joked about not knowing who would be more out of place, me, or Richard, the partner in charge of the project. Other than Chicago (which doesn't even really count), I'd never really been anywhere in The Middle. I'd driven across country once, and ridden the train when I moved from Virginia to San Francisco, but I don't think that really counts.
Tulsa is green, and has a few small rolling hills. Since I was expecting total flatness, almost to an oppressive amount of sky flatness, this was somewhat surprising. Even more shocking - Tulsa has a great number of interesting buildings. As I learned while I was there for a couple of short days, Tulsa was a very wealthy city during the oil boom, and had done an impressive job of creating a beautiful sky line (well, at least until skyscrapers found their way there). They have a great collection of Art Deco architecture throughout the city.
The most well known would be the Boston Avenue Methodist Church by Bruce Goff. There is a rumor however that a woman working for him was the true designer (just like Camille Claudel and Rodin!) The project I'm working on is for the Philbrook Museum of Art, and the founder of the Museum was Waite Philips, an oilman of the Philips Petroleum family. As we toured around the city on our last day, we saw a couple of the other projects commissioned by him - The Philtower and Philcade - and both were impressive in their own right.
All in all, it doesn't seem like a bad place to spend some time. All the consultants that we met with while there are going to be great to work with, and the client is really satisfied with their decision to hire us (we found out that our competition was two other NYC architects).
One nagging question I have, which was the same as with the Cooper-Hewitt project here: Where are the other women? Why are all of the architects or engineers at a project manager level men? It seems that there are always women at the client side of the table, and Historic Preservation offices have no shortage of women, but why is it always me, alone at the table on the consultant side on these larger institutional projects? It's a bit frustrating.
