Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 15, 1995 TAG: 9511150021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHLEEN WILSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
That's because Gary Leivers, an architectural designer for Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern, placed the late British film director there. Just look at one of his drawings of a proposed new entry for the museum.
Hitchcock was well-known for making quirky cameo appearances in his own films. In ``Strangers on a Train,'' he struggles to board a train while carrying a cello. In ``North by Northwest,'' he just misses a bus.
Somewhere along the way, Hitch started wandering into 29-year-old Leivers' design and architecture sketches. In any drawing of any structure Leivers has designed, you will find a likeness of the director.
Leivers, a graduate of England's prestigious Oxford School of Architecture, says many students put their friends or family members into drawings. One day, he just started drawing in Hitchcock because he's fascinated by the man.
``He was such an amazing presence,'' says Leivers, a native of England with a dead give-away accent. ``He always walked so slowly in his movies, in and out - like a ghost. A joke to himself to reveal to other people.
``Besides, Alfred Hitchcock was such a wonderful orator.''
Leivers landed his job with the Roanoke-based firm three years ago. As an exchange student at the Washington-Alexandria Center for Architecture and Urban Studies, he had made friends at Virginia Tech and was in the habit of coming often to visit.
``I was so taken with how beautiful this area is, I wanted to live here,'' he recalls. One day, he came for good.
``I just got off the plane with a stack of quarters and pulled out the yellow pages,'' explains Leivers.
He called every architecture firm in town. From the airport.
``A couple - including us - were really taken with him,'' says Timm Jamieson, a vice president at Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern. ``Just over the phone, without ever having met him. I mean, here is this guy who just wasn't going to take no for an answer.''
Leivers arrived for an interview the next day with his wild red hair pulled back in a ponytail.
The timing was right for both Leivers and Hayes Seay Mattern & Mattern.
``We were looking for someone to shake up the department a bit, do something fresh,'' says Steve Sowder, director of architecture. ``We had been criticized for our work becoming somewhat dated.''
Since the firm hired him, Leivers has shaken up his department on a daily basis.
``It's like he's always going 120 m.p.h., but he still takes time to smell the roses,'' says Jamieson. ``He lives every day of his life to its fullest.''
Jamieson is struck with Leivers' innate talent.
``All you have to do is describe the space and he will manipulate that in his mind like a computer, and within an hour and a half, he'll have a drawing of exactly what it should look like,'' says Jamieson. ``That's a God-given talent ... sort of like a pianist playing Bach by ear.''
Jamieson describes the expansion of the Roanoke City Jail as perhaps Leivers' best work so far, though he admits it is not something everyone would recognize.
``It is perhaps his greatest achievement, because Gary had to work with much restraint - with an existing mother building.''
Leivers smiles when you mention the jail.
``You know, I am probably the only person in Roanoke who knows both the sheriff of Nottingham and the sheriff of Roanoke,'' he points out.
Leivers grew up in rural England, outside of Nottingham, the son of working-class parents. Although he was one of only about 10 in his class of 500 to go on to higher education, he is quick to downplay the prestige of a master's degree from Oxford.
When told how proud his parents must be, he says, ``No prouder, I'm sure, than any other parents would be of any other son. They would have been proud of me no matter what I did. The truth is, I am very proud of them.''
A photograph in the living room of Leivers' home in South Roanoke shows Leivers and his ``mum'' on graduation day from Oxford.
``That was taken shortly before I left Deep Purple,'' he says wryly, shaking his head at the image of his wild hair.
The young architect admits to having always been an ``American-o-phile.''
``There's never a day I don't wake up and think it's a big dream that I am here,'' he says. And by ``here,'' he means Roanoke.
``Roanoke offers the very best of middle America,'' says Leivers, who has worked in New York, Alabama and South Carolina. ``But I really figure I spun the roulette wheel and came up lucky to land here,''
Back in England, he finds it difficult to translate Roanoke to his friends and family, whose vision of the United States is based on television.
``They think it's all cops and Uzis over here,'' he smiles. ``I try to tell them it's really more like `Little House on the Prairie.'''
About the only gripe Leivers has about the U.S. is the relative lack of importance placed on soccer.
``It's the biggest sport in the world, but there are only 10 teams here locally,'' he says.
``I think I've learned [from Lievers] that American men are boring,'' admits Jamieson. ``We go home after work, drink beer, lay on the couch, play golf and watch `Home Improvement.'''
Not Leivers.
``He's out there running on all cylinders.''
And putting Alfred Hitchcock into his sketches. You can see the late director outside the Transportation Museum and the jail and the YMCA in Rocky Mount. The portly profile turns up in Leivers' drawings of an off-site storage facility for the Smithsonian Institution, the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute and the Malcolm Grow Medical Center at Andrews Air Force Base.
Goethe described architecture as music frozen. But to Leivers, it's something more dynamic - more like an instrument for people to use and enjoy.
``We put people in the sketches to give the structure scale,'' he says. ``But architecture is, after all, about people. It is important to humanize architecture. Many architects forget that. Architecture is a means to an end, and that end is to serve people.''
``When Gary talks about architecture, people find the magic in this business,'' says Jamieson.
``If he decides to stay, I can definitely say he has a future here,'' says Sowder.
``So long as I am enjoying myself and feeling fulfilled, I know I'll still be here'' says Leivers. ``For all the right reasons I came here in the first place.
``I guess I am a bit of an oddity,'' he adds. ``But if I moved somewhere like San Francisco, there'd be a bunch of me. And that would be boring.''
by CNB