Hello. My name is Bob Dillon, and I am a registered architect and the Quality Assurance Director for Vocon Architects New York City office.
The thing I like about my job is that it allows me the opportunity to share my three decades of professional experience in the design, execution, and management of Interior architecture projects with a staff of up-and-coming architects and designers. Education and mentoring are my passions, and I lean into opportunities to share all the things I have learned (including the mistakes) with a young group of talented architects and designers.
Growing up outside of Chicago, I was fascinated by spatial relationships and the materiality of the build environment even as a child. My family encouraged my passion by taking me to tour architecturally significant buildings around the city, visiting grand civic spaces like the Art Institute of Chicago, and experiencing monumental public artworks like the Picasso in Daley Plaza and the Chagall Wall in Downtown Chicago. It fostered a lifelong love of all aspects of design. As a child I would spend endless hours building models from whatever materials I could find and creating pencil drawings of buildings I had visited from memory.
At the ripe old age of eight, I announced to my parents that I wanted to become an architect after touring a grand Victorian edifice in my hometown of Evanston, Illinois. I was a fixture in the architecture section of the local library growing up and spent hours poring over monographs and sketching in my free time. I eventually received my master’s in architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee after first getting my bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. I also took time during the 2008 economic downturn to start studying Interior Architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, which invigorated my passion for design.
I landed my first professional architectural job right out of architecture school in Minneapolis, MN. A few years later, I was offered a position as Project Architect/Manager at a firm in Minneapolis whose work was a mix of high-end residential and commercial. Something about the tactile nature of the materials and the intimate scale of interior architecture clicked for me and it became a career defining opportunity. I have lived and worked in nine cities throughout my career on projects of varying sizes that include healthcare, multi-family housing, ground-up commercial, workplace design, building repositioning, K-12, multiple types of hospitality projects, and the occasional single-family residence. Each new project type is informed by my previous experience while providing me the opportunity to learn something new about various building typologies and end users. All of which I share while mentoring my younger work colleagues.
My commitment to lifelong learning and mentoring comes from my father. My dad was a physician who mentored dozens of younger doctors throughout his decades-long career. He once told me that one of the things he liked about his work was that there was always something new to learn in medicine. I feel the same way about Architecture. There is a great history at its foundation, but the profession is constantly evolving, always shifting. It’s how we use that information and knowledge that matters. And it’s important that we share it so the next generation of architects can build upon what has come before.
One of my favorite quotes is this Greek proverb:
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
I think it eloquently encapsulates my feelings about the role any mentor can have in the career of younger colleagues. Passing on knowledge to those who will carve a new path forward with an understanding of the past and an eye toward the future.