Club Ties magazine was a lifestyle magazine for people in Denver who belonged to private clubs. As associate editor, I wrote on a variety of subjects, from architecture to baseball to squash.

The opening page of an article I wrote on a Denver architectual firm.

The text of the article:

Form Follows Function = Style

"This place is soooo optical!" Jerry Seracuse rolls his eyes and hunches his shoulders in imitation of a young woman's response at seeing the Terracentre, an office complex at the corner of Stout Street and Speer Boulevard that was designed by Seracuse's firm, SLP Architects, one of the largest local architectural firms in the city. His laugh is seconded by his long-time partner Jack Lawler.

They are sitting in a third- floor, round conference room in the Terracentre where their offices are located, offices they share with their partners Don Strauch and Jam Wong who joined the firm several years after it was established. Most of the room's walls are glass. Beyond them are Seracuse and Lawler's offices, each flanked by a balcony. Glass is everywhere, letting in natural light through the long windows that run along two sides of the fifteen-story, trapezoid-shaped building.
Although not everyone has praised the building's exterior of pre-stressed-concrete-and glass bands, few are unaffected by its striking interior. "Optical" sums it up perfectly.

The building's first five stories skirt two of its sides in Mayan pyramid fashion, allowing an interior atrium five stories high. The floors around the atrium look down on a blue-tile pool. To get to those floors-SLP Architects use the second and third floors-one must navigate a mirrored hallway to the five elevators, easily spotted by the deep red walls around them. Three of the elevators have glass sides, two overlook the atrium and one the outdoors.

The interior is defined by its uses and expressed with the aid of building materials-like pre-stressed concrete-that allow SLP Architects to create vast, airy spaces. The influences of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and the International Style of architecture are evident in this and Seracuse and Lawler's other buildings. "Form follows function" is elemental to their working philosophy.

"They're a design-oriented firm," says Max Price, former architectural writer for the Denver Post who has written about SLP. "They're generally held in high respect. They work in a contemporary idiom. All of their solutions are contemporary, but you can't pick out a building and say that's an SLP, because each project has its own design."

When they agreed to go into partnership in 1966, Seracuse and Lawler deliberately did not establish a specific style.

Lawler, medium height with graying, curly hair, leans back on the rear legs of his chair as he talks. "It was one of the premises that we opened our offices with. We said first of all we were going to have a diversified practice, and when you do that, then you automatically fall into the second level and say then we have to make every diversified building its own style.

"Rather than having a style philosophy or a design philosophy for our buildings that we try to impose on each project, we more or less let the individual project factors, such as the site and the client, weather and orientation to the sun, dictate what the design of that particular project will be."

Seracuse, sporting a full beard and mustache streaked with gray, nods while his partner speaks. As evidence of their long and successful relationship, they rarely interrupt each other, constantly reinforce what the other says and more than occasionally sing each other's praises.
"Design has to be realistic, if it's going to be successful," Seracuse says. "It's a question of balance. If design is ruled strictly on the basis of proportions, color, texture, material-and nothing else matters-then the buildings might start costing $5,000 a square foot. But design can't survive as design itself. Design has to be part of all these other things or it has to have a relationship to them."

"We really are happy," Lawler adds, "that you can't drive up and down Denver and pick out our projects, because they all look different. But on the other side of the coin, I think that we're proud of the fact that most of the buildings you look at you can say, 'That belongs to that site, that fits well with that area, that's obviously a Colorado-type project.' I don't think we could take what we do an put it in New York City and have it look right or vice versa.

Seracuse agrees. "When we look at a project, we look at the impact that project has on the space around it."

Frank Lloyd Wright's concern with a building's "organic" function, that is, how it fits into its surroundings, as well as Buckminster Fuller's environmental concerns also can be found in SLP's buildings. The Arvada Center for the Performing Arts is a prime example. Situated comfortably at one side of a long, sloping hill, the brick building is an almost windowless mass of flat surfaces implying hexagonal shapes. Two larger hexagon shapes on each end reach out to invite people into the front doors in a central, indented area. All the windows are on this side of the building, the southern side. Seracuse and Lawler admit the building is one of their favorites.

Southern orientation is another common feature of SLP architecture. The firm incorporated passive solar design into its buildings, long before it was fashionable.

Architects, Lawler says, should be more conscious of designing buildings to take advantage of positive climate features and compensate for negative ones. "We really have a pretty unique climate here in Colorado. The best example, I think, is that if the sun shines, you really have two climates. You have the one that's in sun and the one that's in shadow, and it's more pronounced here than almost any place. We really make an effort to avoid north entries so that in the winter you don't have ice build-up that never goes away. Whereas if you have a southern entryway, you never have to worry about it."

The West Ranch home SLP designed for former astronaut Wally Schirra (who has since moved from the state) is an example of extensive use of passive solar. Handmade Mexican floor tiles set on a bed of sand extend from the entryway through the kitchen and sunroom, absorbing the sun and keeping the house warm year round. Ceiling fans circulate warm air downward, and two moss rock fireplaces add heat as well as beauty.
"It's a very efficient house. It has a nice southern exposure, so you capture a lot of the sun coming through a large glass area. It is also well insulated and all the openings are orientated away from the north. In fact, the house is buried down into the north [side of the mountain] and the garage is on that side, so you've got a buffer between the house and the elements," Lawler says.

Designing houses was one of their mainstays when Jerry Seracuse and Jack Lawler decided in 1966 to leave the architectural firm where they both worked to go into business for themselves.

Seracuse laughs at those early memories. "We decided, why do all those things for somebody else when we could do them for ourselves? We were really dumb! We didn't know how nice it was to have a paycheck! When we started out, we had eight hundred bucks. We used to try to hustle jobs at cocktail parties without letting anybody know we were leaving our former employer."

They soon found themselves crowded into an office in the basement of a house Seracuse owned on Corona Street. Working at home created problems, and it took just one month for things to get out of hand.

Seracuse recalls, "It was, 'Watch the kid while I go down to the grocery store,' and peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches all over the drawings. . . .

"The real clincher, though, was when we had this hot lead in Nebraska," Seracuse continues with a chuckle. "He was coming to town to talk to us about this motel project. We envisioned ourselves bringing this guy down my basement steps into our office, and we kept saying, now, if he comes down each one of these steps, we know the fee is going to come down about a half a percent for each step-that means we're going to owe him about 8 percent!"

The hot lead never showed up, but shortly afterward, they moved into a single office in the Equitable Building in downtown Denver. Their growth was gradual, boosted by occasional jobs like designing twenty-two retail outlets for Montgomery Ward across the west. They stayed in the Equitable Building until their move last year to the Terracentre, but before they left, they renovated the Equitable Building to its former glory of marble, stained glass and mosaic.

Renovation of old structures, houses, commercial buildings, stores-there's almost nothing SLP Architects won't tackle. "Except mortuaries," Seracuse quips. "1 can't stand all those dead people!"
Versatility has brought SLP health and wealth. When times have been tough, they've merely switched gears and turned to different kinds of buildings, as was necessary when the recent glut of downtown office space dried up that kind of work.

Over the last eighteen years, the partners have noticed a pleasing change in the clients who come to them.

"The clientele is much more creative, more design oriented," Lawler says.
"Even the most straight-forward kind of developer," Seracuse adds, "the guy who wants to do it on a shoestring budget, is also dreaming about some of the nice things that could happen on a project.

"We proposed some balconies on a downtown office when we first opened, and the guy looked like we stabbed him or something," Lawler says, then huffs up like an indignant hen in imitation of their former client: "'Put some windows around that and I'll sell it!'"

Now, they don't have to convince clients to add balconies or atriums anymore. People are interest in providing better living and working spaces. Developers are thinking more creatively. They're learning how to compete on more than a bottom-line, dollar basis. Now they are interested in the excitement of the projects, and SLP likes that. "We're not closet designers," Seracuse says. "We like to have the client involved in the design. . . . If you can get them involved and excited, it makes it possible to find better solutions. They feel part of the creation, and I think that's important.

"A large percentage of our clients, now, particularly in the corporate office environment, encourage flexibility in size and style and individual expression," Lawler says.

What brought about this growing maturity on the client's part? Seracuse speculates it is connected to the rash of research concerned with employee job satisfaction. All this research, Seracuse says, tells employers that they can't just throw money at a worker; they have to offer a satisfying environment that instills pride. He notes that his firm's eighty employees often bring friends and relatives to see the Terracentre.

The concern they see among their clients in providing a good working atmosphere for employees has given rise to an art gallery in the Terracentre that caters to corporations. Co-owned by Sue Lawler, Jack's wife, and Vicki Hamilton-Myhren, Hamilton-Lawler Galleries sells primarily the works of California artists to corporate offices. Although their office and main showroom is in a glass-walled room at the building's entrance, they use the offices of SLP to display their paintings and sculptures so potential clients can see how the art looks in situ.

The gallery concentrates primarily on California artists because, Hamilton-Myhren says, they are underrepresented in Denver galleries. It also sells Colorado artwork, however, and is the only representative in the United States for the poster photography of Time, Incorporated. The posters are from photographs that have appeared in various Time publications.

The gallery's contacts with the corporate world have come through networking, It's a business where who you know counts for everything. SLP has been one of the beneficiaries of these contacts: the architectural firm has given the gallery leads for corporate clients, and the gallery, Sue Lawler says, has pointed some clients toward SLP .This symbiotic relationship will go a step further in March when the gallery sponsors "art happenings" using the building and the gallery's art for the public's enjoyment.

SLP's interest in bringing enjoyment to the public is nothing new. Jerry Seracuse and Jack Lawler believe that SLP has something to give to the community.

"We get involved in things other than feathering our own nest," Seracuse says. "Our attitude is that the community has been pretty damn good to us: we've been able to practice here. We've got a dynamite environment to practice in both from an aesthetic standpoint and an economic standpoint."

To that end, the firm sponsors Nature on KRMA- TV Channel 6, the public broadcasting station. It also helps sponsor the Governor's Cup running race-appropriately, for Seracuse is an ex-runner and Lawler still runs, counting four marathons under his running shoes.
"We have always prided ourselves in this firm on being open minded in the world around us," Lawler says. "We don't rigidly adhere to one set of rules that says this is the way you do architectural projects. We think we've been on the leading edge of the most realistic kinds of things that have gone on in the advancement of the profession. We also pride ourselves on the fact that we aren't just a firm that practices in our offices and has nothing to do with our community. We've put back a whole lot into our community."

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