Q: What do you love most about architecture and urban design?
A: I think what I love the most is just the ability to create great places. It does take a lot of time, but you can actually see the results of your efforts. And I really believe what we do is bettering the community or the environment.
Q: What do you dislike about it?
A: I think I dislike how long it takes. Particularly with political approvals, it seems like sometimes they take a lot longer than they should for good projects.
I’m not saying that every project should go through quickly, but I’ve actually been working with a couple of communities to try to figure out how to streamline a process for good design and good projects. So I think that’s probably what becomes the most frustrating.
Q: What are some of Design Workshop’s well-known projects?
A: We’re an international firm, so we have projects all over the place.
In Denver, probably our most well-known project is Riverfront Park. We did all the planning and approvals on the site and then continued to work with East-West Partners.
We’re also currently working on the redevelopment of the Gates Rubber factory with Cherokee (Denver LLC) and Joseph Freed and Associates. So we’ve been working on that for over five years and can’t wait until something actually gets built.
Outside of Denver, a lot of our work is well-known in the resorts. So we’ve pretty much worked in every major mountain resort. We did the work at Blackcomb at Whistler, British Columbia, a lot of work at Aspen, including the Little Nell hotel.
Q: As someone with degrees in communication and business administration, are there challenges to being president when you don’t have an architecture education or background?
A: I don’t think so. I think it would be if I hadn’t been part of this profession for so long. But working with our clients and on projects for as long as I have, I think I understand the business very well. I can speak the language. I just can’t draw. And I don’t do AutoCAD.
Q: Why does the firm have offices in São Paulo and Santiago?
A: We opened the office in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1992 because we were doing a lot of work with the second-largest iron-ore mining company there. And because of their tax structure, they pay a tremendous premium for using companies outside of the country.
They would use us for the big ideas, but when it came to implementation and design of projects, they said, ‘Thanks, but we’re going to use someone local.’ So we said, ‘If we were the local firm, would you hire us?’ We had a colleague in Dallas who was from Brazil and was very anxious to go back and raise his family there, and we knew that we had a lot of work to do in opening that office. So that was the impetus for it and it’s continued now for 15 years.
We really look at South America as a growth market, so Santiago came about similarly. We had some employees who were interested in going back to South America where they were from and we found two young, talented architects that had a small office in Santiago that were willing to become part of Design Workshop.
Q: Why do you see South America as a growth market?
A: You see the population increase. You see the redeveloping of the major cities and in some of the areas you also see resorts as a component of growth. And then also resource planning – preserving the natural resources and determining what part of those large areas of land are appropriate for new development.
Q: What do you do outside of work?
A: I always am out bicycling. I’m a volunteer with the National Sports Center for the Disabled. So I’m a volunteer ski instructor in the winter and I work with their therapeutic horse-riding program in the summer.
As much as my husband and I travel for work, we tend to then travel a lot outside of work. So last year we went to Italy for three weeks and I went on a wilderness horseback trip in Canada last year. So we tend to do a little bit of adventure travel as well.
Edited for length and clarity by Kelly Yamanouchi.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporter’s error Zimmermann’s last name was misspelled.
