After undergraduate school, I spent two years in the Army, including a year in Vietnam as a combat engineer. I was obsessed with seeing Angkor Wat, only a tempting 250 miles away in Cambodia but inaccessible to anyone in the U.S. military. At the end of my tour, I arranged to be discharged while still in Vietnam and headed for Cambodia. I was subsequently caught up in the coup that dethroned Prince Sihanouk. The airports were closed, and I had to walk out to Thailand, but I saw Angkor Wat and then circled the globe, including the Trans-Siberian Railway, finally returning to San Francisco.
After graduate school at UCLA, I was back in the San Francisco Bay Area, starting my own architecture and engineering firm, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. Around 1980, we started a historic preservation studio at our firm, Interactive Resources, and over the next 45 years played a role in saving and rehabilitating some of California’s most iconic structures, including Coit Tower in San Francisco, 50 UN Plaza in San Francisco and the Jesse Unruh State Office Building in Sacramento.
