Designing their dream: architects Luis Collado and Jose Luis de la Fuente went back to the drawing board to start their own company, STL architects, in Chicago, which the latter dubs "the Rome of the United States." - Business

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, Feb-March, 2003 by Ed Finkel

The great German architect Mies Van der Rohe, who worked in Chicago for many years, believed that form is not the object of an architect's work--rather, it is the result.

Two latter-day European transplants to America's architectural Mecca, Luis Collado and Jose Luis de la Fuente, are following Van der Rohe's dictum in building a growing and diverse body of work for their firm, STL Architects which counts the Chicago Public Schools, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Harris Bank among its key clients.

"Van der Rohe said that if you do everything you need to do to drive toward all architectural solution, you will end up with a form that is beautiful, that is pleasant, that has to do with an environment, that really addresses all the [functional and aesthetic] issues. In addressing all those issues, there is beauty within," De la Fuente says, during an interview in the firm's modest, drop-ceilinged, cubicled space on the sixth floor of the Chicago Sun-Times building, which would not make anyone's list of the city's architectural treasures.

Collado vividly remembers falling in love with Chicago's architectural beauty as he finished his master's degree at Harvard University and accepted a position at the large architectural firm oil Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where both once worked.

"The practice of architecture in Chicago is much more exciting than my experiences in other cities," Collado says. "The architectural scene Call still be a prominent [cultural] leader. That has been forgotten in many other cities. Cab drivers can give you an architectural tour. Both major newspapers write about architecture."

De la Fuente, who dubs Chicago the "Rome of the United States," traces its heritage from the turn-of-the-20th-century classics that first earned the city its reputation, to post-World War II treasures such as the towering John Hancock Center. "It was designed in 1965, and it looks like it was designed two years ago," he says.

Another plus for Chicago is the vibrant Latino community, which grew from 13 to 20 percent of the city's population between 1990 and 2000. "One of the great things in this community is how open, how accessible the Hispanic community has been," Collado says. "I've been able to introduce myself, meet people. There are organizations for the sole purpose of networking within the Latino community."

Personal relationships helped to bring both men to this backdrop: both are married to American women. Although Collado and De la Fuente attended the same school in Madrid, one year apart, and even had friends and professors in common, they did not meet until a mutual friend put them in touch after De la Fuente moved to Chicago. He joined Collado at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where both worked until Collado left in 1996.

Although he had been successful at Skidmore, developing a significant client base in Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, Collado says he was driven by a desire to practice in Chicago and the dream of beginning his own firm, a much more common path for architects in Spain than in the United States.

"I had good prospects ahead of me and very much an opportunity to be a corporate architect within a large company," Collado says. But in Spain, "that is not what I bad been trained for. You think of yourself as an entrepreneur. An architect is not someone who works for another architect, who works for another architect, who works lot the client. At some point, you just feel, 'Well, either I continue, and this is going to be a one-way street, or, if I am ever going to give it a shot, this is the moment to do it.'"

His former colleagues at Skidmore wished him well, in spite of the fact that he might be competing against them for clients. "I remain friends, very good friends, with most of the colleagues at that company who were my mentors," Collado says. "To this day, they come to me and say, 'You did good. I am so glad for you.'"

Richard Tomlinson, a partner at Skidmore who worked more closely with Collado than with De la Fuente, says Collado possesses an unusual degree of professionalism. "He is a well-rounded architect and has many skills, and he can apply those in a very positive way to serve clients," Tomlinson says. Launching one's own firm "is risky, and sometimes those things fail--but as long as he was pursuing what he thought was best, I was doing anything I could to help him."

Once he made the leap of faith, Collado said, "I really couldn't wait for the time when I would be able to approach Jose Luis with a serious business proposition." He did so after 18 months, and De la Fuente "was crazy enough to give it a shot."

For De la Fuente, who left Skidmore to join Collado in 1998, the entrepreneurial path seemed a bit less daunting, because he had owned an architectural firm in Spain in the early 1990s. "My perception of the risk was very different," De la Fuente says.

"When I came to the United States, and we had lunch for the first time, Luis said, 'You know what, Jose? It is much inure difficult to be a successful architect on your own in the United States than elsewhere.' He was right. And I think I was naive enough. The truth is that that naivete may be what led me to say, 'Why not?'"