My dad passed away recently. I’m not one to write about personal matters on social media or post them on the internet, especially on a professional forum such as LinkedIn. Nor am I looking for sympathy or condolences. Hopefully, each of us follows our passion as a career, and at some point in our lives inspiration from another developed the passion we follow today; I would like to tell you about the man that inspired me.
My dad didn’t graduate high school, though he did earn a GED at some point, but he taught me more than anyone ever could. When I was young our house was littered with blueprints. At that time my dad worked on framing crews all over Denver as the suburbs were sprouting up around the city. There were building plans everywhere. Old rolled-up drawings were used as baseball bats, tunnels for Hot Wheels, and of course swords.
Those blueprints were also how I learned to read. My mom and dad taught me my first words from blueprints and newspapers. I understood plan, section, and elevation before I was in the first grade. I remember learning fractions on a tape measure. Sometime around second or third grade I started doodling plans for a treehouse in our yard. I’d take them home and show them to my dad and he would help me make sure my plans lined up with my elevations and that my drawing was to some kind of scale.
I was probably 7 or 8 years old when my dad started building a house for us in what was our backyard at the time. I remember running wire through the drilled holes in the wood studs, carrying tools and material from one place to another, handing insulation up to my dad, and even remember helping my dad and brother plumb and set a toilet in the basement bathroom. I also remember when my dad fell from the second floor and broke both wrists and his jaw. My grandfather cried as he held my hand and tried to reassure me that dad would be okay. I also remember our basement flooding before we moved in (in February I think), with what seemed like 4-5 feet of water (it was probably much less, but everything looks bigger when you’re a kid) and my dad “dove” in the freezing water to find the main valve and turn the water off.
We didn’t live in that house for long, but it too was filled with plans. We also had a balsa wood model of that house that my dad built before construction started. When we moved from Denver to New York in the late ’80s my dad would go on to design and build two more of the houses we would live in. He didn’t have a college degree much less an architect’s license, but he hand-drafted the plans for those homes, got a structural engineer to stamp them, and took them into the building department to get his permit.
I remember when my parents bought the land for the first house on six acres on a wooded hillside. My dad found the perfect spot for the best view of the valley and figured out how to get the quarter-mile driveway up the hill and through the trees to get to the building spot. I think it took something like 6-8 years to finish that house. Of course, my dad had a commercial framing and drywall business to run and a family to feed, so he couldn’t spend all his time building that house.
For me, going to school to become an architect seemed like the natural thing to do. I briefly considered getting an art degree, but the term “starving artist” scared me away from that path. Little did I know about the wages a young architect makes! The last job I ever worked on with my dad was a guitar store in Downtown Disney sometime during my college years. On my last day on the jobsite, when everyone was headed home, my dad announced to the crew that I was off to college to become an architect, I was soundly booed!
Like most young men that are starting a career and a family, my communication with my parents became less frequent, especially after I graduated college and moved back to Denver. During my early 30s when I was working at Aardex I was in the office around 10 p.m. I had been there since 7 a.m. and was exhausted. But as I sat at my desk I remember feeling such a sense of accomplishment. I wrote my dad an email telling him about my day and thanking him for introducing me to the world of design and construction. His reply was so simple, yet so profound, “There’s nothing better than creating something with your own hands and then standing back and taking it in.”
Over the years my parents have had the opportunity to tour a number of the projects I worked on: Signature Centre, Pearl Place, and recently Julian32 and Capitol Center. I was never sure if my dad was paying attention, but a few weeks later he’d ask me some question about a detail here or there on a project, why we did it that way, how we were going to get such-and-such to work. He was always thinking, working out the building problems in his head over and over until the solution came to him. He had an amazing ability to envision every detail on a project in three dimensions before any work began. The homes he built in New York are sculptures that work with, in and around the land, trees, rocks, and water. What he accomplished with his imagination and his own two hands was remarkable.
In 2012 my parents moved back to Denver and since then we’d worked together on many a home project. I got a chance to watch my dad work with my wife (those two are something on a project, they’d always say “Careful here comes the boss!” every time I walked in the room), and to watch him teach my sons about creating, planning and building. It was an absolute blessing.
The homes and stores my dad built will never win any AIA awards, they’ll never be featured in a magazine, but they will stand as a reminder of his talent and for people to enjoy for generations to come. His creativity, ingenuity, determination, and his skill were truly inspiring, but it was also the joy he got from building and the impression it left on me that developed the passion I have for the built environment today. I hope that when you look at the projects I’ve worked on over the years you’ll remember this post and think of my dad, the man who inspired me.
In memory of David R. Hellbusch, 1948 – 2021.
