Hispanic Enterprise - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 16) BRIEFCASE TRENDSETTER ARCHITECTURE’S HIGH ROAD El Taller Colaborativo’s Alex Garcia fights the architectural outsourcing trend to keep designs in harmony with their surroundings and in tune with clients’ needs. n his third year at college, Alex Garcia threw caution and his scholarship to the wind and said adios to the Illinois Institute of Technology, having realized that his vision of architectural freedom was out of sync with the school’s rigid Bauhaus roots. Today he guides his own architecture firm, El Taller Colaborativo or ETC, with the same free spirit. In Garcia’s view, architecture is fundamental to civilization in both an aesthetic and functional sense, and you either do it right, or suffer. Back in his home borough of Manhattan, he found the right environment for completing his degree at City College of New York, additionally inspiring because of CCNY’s location “in one of the greatest experiments in urban planning and architecture in the world.” The theory, the lore, the history of architecture captivated him at the time and “I was a professional student for awhile,” he says, describing the era when he earned two master’s degrees, one for Transportation Planning 16 I and Engineering at Polytechnic University of New York and the second in Urban Design at CCNY, all while working full time. Idealism is ingrained in Garcia’s reverence for architecture, and he and co-founder Luis Sanchez, PE, pooled the resources of a group of friends who were either architects or engineers to form a studio structured as a collective: El Taller Colaborativo. It was an admirable concept but “more theoretical than practical.” After two other false starts, the firm was organized as a professional corporation in March 1985 by Garcia and Sanchez. Sanchez retired in 2002 and is currently Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner. El Taller Colaborativo started out humbly enough, with Garcia working from his living room in Union City on a pair of Apple computers that he and Sanchez called their “startup capital.” The first two years were hard, and El Taller Colaborativo made so little money that Garcia’s wife only half-jokingly referred to it as a hobby. Luckily Muriel was there to keep the wolf from the door—she had a full-time job with great medical benefits at the time— while providing the emotional boost and belief in the firm’s future that Garcia needed. Without that, Garcia says, “I would have thrown in the towel after just one year.” ETC’s first big project was a city sidewalk and streetscape improvement project, but unfortunately, he says, it was “not a profitable project, and in fact, the draftsman earned more money than either Sanchez or I did that year.” A year later, he sold the house and went through the expense of setting up an office in the same town. It was a gamble, but he decided to give it a couple of years. He soon found he’d played a winning hand. ETC landed a contract with Raytheon as architects for 21 of the 23 stations on New Jersey Transit’s Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit System, a passenger service in northern New Jersey. Soon the company had enough accounts receivable to sustain a payroll that included 45 people, a number that fluctuates yearly depending on the firm’s contracts. Five years ago ETC moved its headquarters onwards and upwards to Newark, New Jersey. December/January 2008 HISPANIC ENTERPRISE
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