Field Notes: Wizardry Series with Bob Russ
- Jun 9
- 8 min read
Updated: Jun 10
Some of the most valuable knowledge in this firm has never been written down. It lives in the heads of the people who've been doing this for decades — earned through real projects, difficult clients, and years of figuring things out the hard way.
The Wizardry Series, created by Anastasia Johnson, Design Associate, is our attempt to change that. Through a series of recorded conversations with McKinley's most experienced people, we're capturing the lessons, instincts, and hard-won wisdom that don't show up in any manual or textbook.
The first episode features Bob Russ — architect, performing arts specialist, and one of the firm's most seasoned voices — reflecting on decades of practice, the lessons that shaped him, and what he'd want every person at McKinley to know.
Below is an edited version of his conversation, shaped for the page.
The Disco Drummer Who Became an Architect
Origins
Bob Russ grew up in a neighborhood where nobody was an architect. His aunts and uncles were tradespeople — bakers, roofers, bookkeepers, construction workers. His father owned a bakery, though he'd never wanted to. Baking was simply the opportunity that had been available to him. When it came time for Bob to think about his future, his father was clear on one point: the bakery was not an option.
Like a lot of people who end up in design, Bob's strengths didn't show up on a report card. Geometry came naturally; calculus and writing, less so. What emerged instead — quietly, in a drafting class — was something harder to grade and far more useful. A high school shop teacher had recognized something in him early and given him real work — floor plans for friends, drawings of a conveyor belt, pen-and-ink studies of towboats on the river. He was earning a hundred dollars a job before he had any clear sense of what architecture was. He assumed he'd become a draftsman. Then his parents — neither of whom knew any architects, both of whom had wanted to go to college and never had the chance — said something he still describes as a flash of brilliance.
"If you're a draftsman, you can't be an architect. But if you're an architect, you can always be a draftsman. Don't limit yourself." They weren't people who knew anything about the profession. But they knew that. I've thought about it ever since. — Bob Russ
He applied to Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, and Pratt. The first two looked at his SAT scores and suggested he try again another year. Pratt, founded as a trade school and still operating with something of that spirit, was more interested in his portfolio. During his interview, he could hear through a glass partition the student being seen in the adjacent room — someone who had arrived with nothing to show. The interviewers asked if he did anything creative. He said he played piano. There happened to be a piano in the hallway outside the offices. They sent him out to play.
He went out and played a beautiful classical piece, came back in, and they said: "See you next fall." I think what Pratt was looking for was some nugget of creativity — some desire or passion, something that told them you wanted to be an architect. I had a drafting portfolio. That was enough. It was the right school for me.
Everything else in my life after that point was different.— Bob Russ
LOOK AND READ
New York City in the late nineteen-seventies was on the verge of bankruptcy — chaotic, intense, and for someone who had never been there, genuinely transformative. The student body at Pratt was working-class and focused, many of them the first in their families to attend college. The instructors were working architects with offices in the city who came out to teach a class or two a week. The atmosphere was serious without being humorless, and the school ran on pass-fail with written critiques in place of grades.
Bob's first critique came back with two words on it.
Look and read. That was all he wrote. His point was simple: you're a good draftsman, but you know nothing about architecture. Start looking at the world around you — see how architecture plays a part in it. And read. Start reading everything you can find on the subject, to understand what it's all about beyond what we're going to teach you here. I was an empty vessel. It was just: how fast can we fill you up? I think those two words are the biggest thing I took out of school. I'm still working on them. — Bob Russ
That first year also produced a lesson Bob has carried for his entire career. His class was handed identical programs for a museum — gallery space, offices, storage room, everything on a single handwritten sheet — and asked to design it. A week later, twenty students brought back twenty entirely different buildings.
I was astounded at the wide variety of solutions. I thought — we all got the same piece of paper. Everybody must be making some version of the same answer. But there was everything from the most lyrical, sensual forms to the most rigid, blocky ones, and everything in between. That always struck me. The same information, twenty architects, twenty completely different solutions. Every project is different. Every project leads somewhere new. There's never one way to do it — it's just a matter of how you get to the better one. It's a lifelong process. You're always on a journey that doesn't end.— Bob Russ
KINDERGARTEN
The lesson that has stayed with Bob longest came from a third-year instructor named Vittorio Giorgini — Italian, passionate, and by Bob's description entirely unreserved. A few weeks into the semester, students had fallen into a habit of presenting their work as if it were already remarkable. Giorgini stopped everything.
He sat us all down and said: Stop. All of you just stop what you're doing. "You come in here thinking you're the next Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe. You're not. You're nowhere near it. You're in kindergarten. You don't know anything." And then he said: what you need to do first, before you even think about becoming a master architect, is spend your time becoming a really good professional architect. Get there first. And once you're there — if you're even better and the rest of the world agrees — then you push on. But you can't go right to master architect from your third year of college. The overconfidence, the attitude — that's what will stop you.
That has stayed with me every single day. Not "how do I make the most amazing building?" but: how do I get a little better at being a good professional architect? It's a long process. Not five years. Not eight. They said it then, and I've found it to be true: it takes easily twenty years before you have enough of the pieces to feel like you really know what you're doing. Some people get there faster. Some far slower. Some never get there. It wasn't until I was about twenty years out of school — after the project management, the proposals, the job sites and the bigger and bigger projects — that I started to feel less stressed when the phone rang. That I had enough of the experience to just begin to be a fully functioning professional architect. — Bob Russ
PASSION AND SCIENCE
Architecture, Bob is quick to point out, is not primarily a visual discipline. A large part of the job happens in rooms full of people, not rooms full of drawings — and learning to hold a room took him years of deliberate effort.
A classmate pulled me aside after a presentation once and said: "You speak very passionately — but also scientifically." I've thought about that sentence my entire career. That balance is what the job demands. The passion — sharing what you're feeling about a project, making a client feel that what you're building together is important — and the scientific part: the facts, the figures, the knowledge to back it up. Not just waving your hands and saying "aren't we amazing."
Albert Filoni — the F in MCF — had been on the debate team in college and was skilled at presentation. Early on he'd watch me get flustered, talking too fast, repeating myself, filling every silence. He'd say: slow down. Take a breath. Think about the next sentence before you say it. Make your point, then let the room respond. It sounds simple. It isn't. — Bob Russ
Getting comfortable in front of people was, by his own account, a deliberate project. Bob was a shy kid — genuinely introverted — and the transformation was neither quick nor accidental. Playing in bands through his teens helped. He got used to difficult rooms: quiet weddings where two families didn't get along and nobody danced and the band played all night to blank stares. At Pratt, he answered a casting notice for a student theater in the basement of the architecture building and ended up doing three productions.
In the Molière farce, there were scenes where we were beating up another actor with a slapstick, and he's trying not to break character while hissing at me — "You're hitting me too hard! Take it easy!" — and I'm trying not to laugh. And then I got the lead in a Picasso play, which did not go over well with the theater majors. The director explained that something about my natural stiffness onstage suited the character. I thought: gee, thanks. But we made it through. And that first moment when the stage lights come up and you haven't done this before — that was wildly scary, even though I'd played in bands for years. Something about the format. Something about being in front of your peers. You learn a lot about yourself in that moment.
There was also a class with Juan Downey, an architect turned video artist, who brought his Sony Betamax into the studio so we could present on camera and watch ourselves back. You see things on video you cannot see any other way. How many times you say "you know." That you've been talking to the board instead of the room. The energy dropping when you lose the thread. I sat in a Teams meeting not long ago and realized I was doing something — pacing myself, facing the camera, managing a silence — and traced it straight back to that class. Forty years later. — Bob Russ
I'm proud of the work we've done here. Most days I feel good about it. But if I could tell my younger self anything, it would just be that: LOOK AND READ, go deeper. There's more there than you think, and you have more time to find it than it feels like you do — until suddenly you don't. It's been more stressful than I probably hoped. But all jobs are. That's why it's a job. All things considered, I'd do it again. Though I'm seriously considering going back to disco drumming. I think that time has come. I've sacrificed enough. — Bob Russ
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