Bob Clark Beyond: Inspiration

latest inspiration posts

The Job Is The Boss: Rounding Out Week One

What a whirlwind! The Job is The Boss 2020 Tour got off to a great start this week with visits to 10 different amazing job sites. It is so invigorating to finally get to meet with my teams in person instead of these ZOOM calls. Nothing replaces face to face.

October's Featured Architect: Gyo Obata

This month’s featured architect is Gyo Obata, my friend and the gifted architect behind HOK (Hellmuth, Obata, Kassabaum)—the St. Louis architecture firm of international fame. Obata is Japanese-American and was born in San Francisco, coming of age in the turbulent era of World War II. In 1942, Obata narrowly missed being sent to an internment camp for people of Japanese descent when, the night before internment, he received word of having been accepted into the architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis. He left that night. Both of Obata’s parents had been artists—his mother, Haruko Obata, was a floral designer and his father, Chiura Obata, was a painter whose work is also part of my private art collection. Gyo Obata himself has been one of the most influential architects of his time. Following his graduation from Washington University, Obata went to graduate school outside of Detroit, studying under the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook. Some years later he was recruited to work for architect Minoru Yamasaki, with whom he designed Lambert Airport in St. Louis—one of the first modern airports to invoke the glamour and ingenuity of travel while the traveler was still on the ground. As Yamasaki’s health declined, Obata joined forces with colleagues and Washington University alumni George Hellmuth and George Kassabaum to form HOK. This was in 1955 and allowed Obata to focus completely on design while Hellmuth worked on marketing and Kassabaum dealt with operations. From the beginning, it was important to them to create a highly diversified firm that had a fully integrated architecture, engineering, and design practice, allowing them to expand quickly and become the extensive firm it is today with more than 1,600 employees and 24 offices worldwide.

Unvarnished by Eric Alperin and Deborah Stoll

This book is an interesting behind-the-scenes look at bartending, but also gives great recipes and methodologies to please even the most sophisticated drinkers. I’ve often fantasized or thought that if I wasn’t one of North America’s largest builders, I would’ve been a bartender. Anthony Bourdain sidetracked me for a short bit, thinking I might become a famous chef, but I was too loose with a knife and figured I would cut my fingers off eventually.

October's Featured Artist: Sanford Biggers

This month’s featured artist, Sanford Biggers, is a New York City-based multidisciplinary artist who defies categorization. There is hardly a medium that Biggers has neglected to experiment with, boasting an oeuvre that includes sculpture, painting, mixed media, performance art, conceptual art, and film. Mr. Biggers, however, has not limited himself to the visual arts. As the lead and keyboardist of the multimedia concept band Moon Medicin, he also operates as the creative director, putting together performances in collaboration with other musicians featuring backdrop images of “sci-fi, punk, sacred geometry, coded symbology, film noir, minstrels, world politics, and ceremonial dance.” Born and raised in Los Angeles, Biggers received his master’s from the Art Institute of Chicago with a specialization in painting, before landing in New York City in 1999 to complete an artist residency at Harlem’s Studio Museum. Place is an important notion in his work, as he draws from his experiences of growing up in Los Angeles, teaching English in Japan, and spending a large part of his adult life in New York City. Biggers’ work in general is an act of “material storytelling” that employs motifs related to his concerns with the Black experience, violence in America, Buddhism, and the narrativization of the cultural and political history of the United States.

Renzo Piano

“The architect cannot change the world, only materialise its changes. I prefer to do public projects, because they make the city. Places of acquaintance make people more curious and the city better.” -Renzo Piano

Mindset by Carol Dweck

You can have the most sophisticated strategy in life or in business, but if you don’t have the right mindset and positive attitude, you can still prevent yourself from achieving to the height of your potential. Dweck details the difference between those with a fixed mindset, and those with a growth mindset, demonstrating how having a growth mindset can dramatically enhance your talents and success in all facets of life.

Inspiration

I have always had an insatiable curiosity

What causes me to get out of bed every morning is driven by inspiration. Ever since I was a little boy, I was inspired by my insatiable curiosity, which caused me to be a reader, a thinker, and a dreamer.

I can remember being inspired by seeing Bobby Kennedy on TV and watching videotapes of Martin Luther King Jr., and being deeply saddened by their assassination even though I was only 10 years old when I experienced all of this.

As a little boy, rocket flight was a big thing. I remember being fascinated by the moon and the stars and the astronauts exploring them.As humans we are achieving remarkable things that only a handful of years before were just in the imagination.