Susan Gushe ushers a visitor down hallways and around a gigantic living wall that's growing in a central atrium of architecture firm Perkins + Will Vancouver's Homer Street office.
"I don't have an office," the managing director explains as she searches for an empty boardroom to use for a meeting.
"We work in teams, and all the teams are in pods. When we finish a project and start a new one, the teams shift."
Gushe decides on a boardroom that has drawings on the wall and jokingly describes them as "top secret."
The cryptic sketches form part of the work for a job that the Vancouver office of American architecture giant Perkins + Will has not yet won. Five staff have worked on the project for three months, so the investment to date is substantial given that there is no guarantee that tangible work or revenue will ever flow from it.
The firm's reputation puts it in good stead to win new contracts.
Gushe's challenge in her relatively new role at the helm of the company is to convince clients that losing influential founder Peter Busby to head Perkins + Will San Francisco last May will not erode the quality of the firm's work.
Busby has been described as a "rock star" in the constellation of the green architecture movement, so his absence is palpable, even though he still lives part-time in Vancouver and occasionally contributes thoughts on the Vancouver office's designs.
The Vancouver office's architectural team, however, has stayed pretty much intact during the past few years.
Known for designing iconic Vancouver buildings, such as One Wall Centre and the $200 million Marine Gateway project being built above the Marine Drive Canada Line station, Perkins + Will Vancouver usually works on about 10 projects at a time.
"We've been transitioning in the last year, in the eyes of our clients, from being a single-headed firm with a single proprietor in Peter Busby," Gushe said. "The firm was not just Peter Busby. It's really all of these people who are incredibly smart and have a diversity of expertise."
The 80-employee firm has 52 architects and a six-person research department that adds insight on projects during the conceptual stage.
It's also the largest architecture firm in Vancouver with a female managing director – a fact that is not lost on Gushe, who knows many women architects give up their careers when they start families.
Gushe very briefly put in her own notice when she returned to work after giving birth to twins in 2003.
"I wanted to come back part time," she said. "The response, which was the industry response, is that it's not possible to be an associate and manage projects and clients and work part time."
She was 37 years old and unsure whether she would have another chance to be a new mother. So, given the all-or-nothing choice, she told Busby in 2004 that she would be leaving.
Busby, who founded the firm in 1984 and operated it as a partnership with Paul Bridger between 1986 and 1996, sold it to Perkins + Will for an undisclosed amount in 2004.
That made the timing perfect for Gushe, because the U.S. architectural giant wanted its Vancouver office to have an operations director.
Busby told Business in Vancouver that he considered the operations director post a part-time position. He asked Gushe if she was interested in filling the role and performing such duties as hiring staff, managing risk and liability and overseeing the financial management of the office.
"We had many years of growth and profitability under her as director of operations," Busby said. "She has a great business head on her."
The job allowed Gushe to work partly from home.
As her children aged, Perkins + Will's Vancouver office grew. That allowed her to ease back into working full time as the director of operations role expanded.
It also made Gushe the natural choice to became Perkins + Will Vancouver's managing director last March, when Busby left.
"She has different strengths than Peter," said Paul Fast, who is a structural engineer and managing partner at Fast + Epp, which has worked on several projects with Perkins + Will. "She is an excellent stabilizing influence in the office given her organizational capacity and managerial abilities. She's very cool, calm and collected."
Back in the boardroom with the "top secret" sketches, Gushe reveals some of that stabilizing influence by reflecting on the firm's evolution.
She joined the firm in 1993 as a relatively recent graduate from the University of Waterloo's architecture program.
Months later, she designed a medical laboratory building in the Discovery Parks business park.
By 1997, she had become a registered architect with the Architectural Institute of British Columbia, and the following year she was promoted to Busby and Associates associate.
The firm's work was then split between designing residential structures for developers and designing buildings at universities. It also designed the Millennium Line's Brentwood and Gilmore stations.
Gushe was able to watch the firm's capacity evolve following Perkins + Will's 2004 acquisition. With more resources and contacts at its disposal, work started to flow. The firm cemented its reputation for high quality transit station design by winning work designing seven stations in Ottawa, several Canada Line stations in Richmond and some transit station work in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
It also added new areas of expertise such as hospital design.
"The key to the success of the acquisition in our case is that Perkins + Will has a long reach," Gushe said. "They grow by acquisition, and when they acquire firms, they don't have a homogeneous culture that they try to distribute to the firms. We're really a federation of offices."
