Change of heart: Torti Gallas and Partners helped invent sprawl. Now they're leading the charge against it

Residential Architect, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Meghan Drueding

As a young architect a few years out of Notre Dame in the late 1960s, John Torti, FAIA, had an awakening. "I was working at a boutique firm in the Midwest, idealistic and starving, and realized you couldn't make money doing the kind of architecture you dream about in school," he says. "I bundled up all those ideals and put them in a box under my bed." In 1973 he took a job with CHK Architects and Planners, an established production housing firm in Silver Spring, Md., and contented himself with designing unimaginative suburban subdivisions.

But this awakening was a false one. He didn't realize it until the recession of the early '90s, when the formerly prosperous CHK plunged into dire straits. Two of the original partners, Jack Cohen and Leonard Haft, had long since retired. In 1993 the third, an ailing Jack Kerxton, did, too, after naming Torti his successor as president. Now in charge of a foundering firm and with little to lose, Torti made a bold decision. Combining a New Urbanist philosophy with company CFO Tom Gallas' recommendation that CHK pursue a more diverse client base, he announced a radically different, design-oriented direction for the 40-year-old firm. This gutsy move marked John Torti's true awakening. And it led to a rebirth of the firm now known as Torti Gallas and Partners.

back story

Of course, the full story is a bit more complicated. CHK had built a solid reputation as a firm that could deliver cost-effective developer housing. During the 1950s, '60s, and '70s it designed more than 200,000 homes in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. In the 1980s it branched out into hotels, office buildings, and high-rises but always kept merchant housing as its backbone. "They did not have an agenda that related to making great cities, towns, communities," says current principal Neal Payton, AIA, who also worked for the firm in its CHK days. "They made great housing, but it didn't relate to anything larger."

That was OK with Cohen, Haft, and Kerxton. They knew they'd never be esteemed in design circles. Their strength lay in their ability to give developers what they wanted, on time and on budget. Their tight professional and social relationships with clients meant they didn't have to market at all, and their employees were well compensated financially. Talented designers like John Torti came to the firm and stayed, because it gave them a chance to practice architecture while earning a comfortable living.

Cohen, Haft, and Kerxton were strong businessmen, but their training was still in design rather than financial matters. When Cohen and Haft began to phase out in the mid-80s, Kerxton cast his net for a business director to handle the company's affairs. He ended up hiring a hotshot Price Waterhouse accountant named Tom Gallas in 1985, and the other half of the Torti Gallas equation clicked into place. Gallas wasn't a designer, and to CHK that was one of his strengths. He could look at the way the firm functioned and make judgments based on his experience in the financial world. The fresh eye he brought to the firm would eventually become the catalyst Torti needed to make his design vision a reality.

new look

By the time Torti officially took control, CHK's deep well of clients had dried up. It wasn't that they'd gone to another architect--they'd simply gone out of business. CHK's payroll dropped from 165 people to 37. If the firm didn't find new sources of work soon, it was in serious danger of going the same way its clients had.

At Torti's suggestion, Gallas started a marketing division. He researched the possibility of working with recession-resistant, public-sector clients like the military, city housing agencies, and local governments. Though CHK had no experience in such areas, Gallas managed to convince Torti that the future of the firm lay with public-sector work. "Because Tom knew the firm so well, he was not shy about telling the partners what to do," says Torti. "Three years later, two thirds of our business was with public clients, up from zero for the 40 years before that." Gallas also began pursuing national private clients to take the place of the bankrupt local ones.

In addition to the change in client base, the firm underwent a drastic structural revamping. The planning, design, and project-management divisions of CHK had always been entirely separate. "Under the old system, the designer did the design and then walked away," says Gallas. Not anymore. Under the new model, a design team would be responsible for a project from start to finish--getting the job, designing the site plan and architecture, and overseeing construction until the last brick was mortared into place.

The system gave the architects more control over the execution of their work, and it got CHK closer to its goal of achieving high-quality design while still turning a handsome profit. For the first time, the firm started a profit-sharing program that involved every employee, as well as a bonus system based on project team performance rather than individual accomplishments. "When your team succeeds, you succeed," explains Gallas. "It creates an interdependence."