Scott Rawlings, AIA, FACHA, LEED AP Joins PAYETTE as a Principal

Today PAYETTE welcomes Scott Rawlings, AIA, FACHA, LEED AP as a Principal and Healthcare Practice Leader.

Scott joins PAYETTE with over 20 years of experience focused solely on the development of healthcare architecture. Serving as Design Team Leader for projects around the world, he has experience with every scale of healthcare project from new healthcare cities in the Middle East and China, to smaller clinics, inpatient expansions and academic systems. He has been active in the profession, primarily at a national level, serving on the board of the AIA Academy of Architecture for Health Knowledge Community and as national President in 2005. He is a founding member of the American College of Healthcare Architects and frequent speaker on the conference lecture circuit. His focus over the past fifteen years has been the development, growth and leadership of healthcare design studios for a number of major healthcare design firms around the country, growing practices and developing a design process that merges architectural creativity with operational analysis and hard research.

Here, Scott shares a bit about himself.

Why do you do what you do?
Early in life I fully expected to focus on a field in higher math or theoretical physics, but after considering a lifetime dedication to a specific area of study, architecture emerged as really intriguing, if for no other reason than the fact that it presents no one right answer. No matter how much research or exploration you put into a singular problem, there is always another solution to consider. It truly is a career that starts over with each major project.

What are you most excited about in regards to your new role at PAYETTE?
I decided early on to focus on healthcare, selecting a graduate program dedicated to the field. It’s a rather small community and as I was coming up, there were a collection of firms that everyone considered ground-breaking; KMD, Anshen-Allen and PAYETTE. Over the past decade I feel the healthcare design industry has lost some of that energy to recreate. I am excited to round out my career with such a storied firm, combining my experience and passion with the incredible talent available here, and see if I can help re-establish a movement in our profession for creative exploration and invention.

Where is your favorite place in the world?
I’m going to spin this one and say “when” instead of “where.” Sunrise. I have spent the past decade focusing on the international market, working on five continents from South America to the Middle East. Traveling constantly can take a toll, but I found an interesting coping mechanism. I wake up early anyway, so I would venture outside, alone, and watch the sun come up. Any place, no matter how remarkably different, is strangely similar to home at sunrise. Before the burst of humanity hits the streets, and the world is just waking up, everything is equal. Whether it’s the old man uncovering his cart in the market in Cairo, the guy setting up his cafe across from the Pantheon or the girl setting up the tables outside Starbucks on Logan Circle, when a city awakes, it all just seems so similarly comforting.

Who do you admire?
Admiration occurs for a number of reasons. Professionally, I admire IDEO and Steve Jobs for their ability to turn true creativity into a lifelong profession. I admire them for their focus, not on the finished product, but on the process of creative design.

What’s on your iPod?
Pink Floyd. I like to listen to a wide range of music because, along with fashion, music is a good trendsetter for where the creative markets are heading. That said, Pink Floyd.

The sky is the limit: what would you redesign?
Life. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could start out older and more mature, and grow younger? Experience our educational years with the mental capabilities of our parents, handle our professional years with a balance of maturity and youthful energy, then retire with all the means and free time you earned along the way, as a teenager. Or, the check-in process at the airport because that’s just ridiculous.

What do you do in your free time?
I am an incurable workaholic, so I preach finding outside passions that demand you dedicate time to them, and force you to completely unplug. I like to hike into areas devoid of cell coverage, bike for hours with no iPhone, vacations that require NO airplanes or simply doing absolutely nothing, like sitting on a deserted beach in the outer banks from sunrise to sunset. I also play as much golf as possible.

What inspires you?
Working with architecture students. Visiting, crits and lecturing at the Universities always re-energizes me. I love escaping back to the purity of it all – architectural exploration at its roots; back when you could talk for hours about the smallest impact issue because you had all semester to take a project to light schematics. An environment devoid of rules generates a different mental design process that we somehow need to tap back into. And having structural systems that defy gravity is cool too.