ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605030090
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
The person with the most influence over what Roanoke will look like as it moves into the 21st century may not be a city official or a high-profile mover-and-shaker. Meet 35-year-old Harvard graduate and Roanoke native David Hill - a quiet landscape architect who stays up late fine-tuning his vision of this city and the mountains he calls home.
THE WELLS AVENUE hillside was his brainchild. The slope of African grasses mixed with plants native to Europe, Asia and Appalachia was designed to look like ``an afghan over your grandmother's couch,'' David Hill says.
The Hotel Roanoke's hunchbacked Deodar Cedar tree overlooking Roanoke City Market was his baby, too. Stayed up half the night at his drawing table for that one, figuring out how to realign and refigure the entranceway road to save the rare 113-year-old bished historic buildings on West Campbell Avenue where he's moving his offices in July.
If you pay attention to things like the valley's first greenway at Hanging Rock, the brouhaha over Henry Street redevelopment, the placement of American Electric's controversial power line, or even Roanoke's latest nationally registered historic landmark - the Coffee Pot - then you're familiar with Hill Studio's work.
A landscape architect with a firm that also specializes in urban planning and historic preservation, Roanoke-born David Hill ``has got his finger in every pie,'' one civic leader observed.
At 35, he's already made an impact on the look of the region's outdoors, from the Blue Ridge Parkway to the exits along the I-81 corridor.
Williamsburg architect Carlton Abbott, whose father, Stanley, was a chief designer of the parkway, calls Hill a visionary. ``Whether it's a power line or the placement of a fence up to the parkway, all those things and everything in between have a great effect on the visual character of the land,'' says Abbott, also a Roanoke native.
``Skillful landscape architecture preserves natural beauty, and his things will only continue to get more beautiful over time."
Hill has only been in business eight years, but already he's so well-connected that there are few public projects in which his studio isn't somehow involved .
``To me, starting a firm of that scale in Roanoke is just an excellent way to starve,'' says Roanoke architect Richard Rife, of the firm Rife & Wood. ``But somehow he's been able to get himself into the loop.
``He's not second-string, and that's his real genius.''
Even Gainsboro's Evelyn Bethel - a staunch critic of the Henry Street redevelopment plan that Hill Studio designed for the revitalization committee, the city and the housing authority - uses words like ``gracious'' and ``concerned about people'' in describing David Hill.
She adds, too, that he volunteered to design the walls on the southside of Gilmer Avenue Northeast on behalf of her group, the Historic Gainsboro Preservation District.
``He volunteered a lot of time to design a landscaped park for the ruins of First Baptist Church after it burned,'' adds Leslie Giles, architectural historian with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. She believes Hill's work is influencing other area firms to create more historically sensitive designs.
``I think Hill Studio is seen as being the least manipulable - one of the few firms that isn't always trying to do the uncontroversial,'' Giles says.
So, who is this golden boy, and why is everyone raving about him? |n n| First, some fun facts:
His Meyers-Briggs reading: INFJ.
His professional opinion of the much-maligned Market Square Walkway (a rare public project he had nothing to do with): ``I'm like a 2-year-old. I think it's fun to stand there and watch the trains going by underneath.''
The first time one of his plans bombed: His permiere stab at the zoo's master plan, which featured an Oriental pagoda on the side of Mill Mountain. ``I know now that it was totally uncool,'' he says. ``I know now that it's nice to see the mountain right up close from downtown.''
Self-deprecating, shy and uneasy in the spotlight, David Hill is a rare breed in the business. Even his competitors are impressed by his definition of success: He's motivated not by money, but by his love of the landscape.
In 1988, Hill was fresh out of Harvard's grad school when he and his urban-planner wife, Helen, set up shop in downtown Roanoke.
They were eager. They were earnest.
They were, David Hill recalls, clueless when it came to running a business.
When the first bank loan officer told him to submit a written business strategy along with his application, Hill came back with what he calls ``a liberal-arts version of a business plan.''
It reads like Charles Foster Kane's Declaration of Principles from the movie ``Citizen Kane'' - full of idealism, commitment to historical integrity, details on employee profit-sharing and even a section called ``Service to Appalachia: Poverty and a Land of Abundance.''
``The first banker said, `You don't know what you're doing. Forget it,''' Hill remembers.
The second banker was charmed by his persistence. ``Most go into business thinking they'll make a lot of money for themselves,'' recalls Central Fidelity's David Swain, who approved the loan. ``David was just the opposite.
``It was risky, yeah, but in the long run, we knew he'd keep better employees and attract better work. And so far he's been very successful.''
Hill was lucky to start out by hiring another Hill, his father Frank, a Smithey & Boynton architect who was facing mandatory retirement. ``At 65, that's when you finally know what you're doing,'' he says of his father, now 75 and Hill Studio's lead architect.
One of their first nonresidential jobs, a master-plan design for a low-income housing community in rural Tennessee, won a 1989 United Nations World Habitat Award. Hill worked to transform a mine-depleted wasteland into a self-sustaining agricultural community for the area's out-of-work coal-miners.
It opened his eyes to civic-minded planning - to the impact he could make if he branched out to the landscapes beyond rich people's backyards.
Then the building recession of 1989 to 1991 hit. Hill took adjunct positions at Virginia Tech and Roanoke College teaching landscape architecture and Appalachian studies - just to keep the office afloat. ``We hired a few other people, and everybody wrote proposals for anything that moved,'' he recalls.
Architect Don Harwood, recently laid off from an area firm, was thinking of hanging out his own shingle when Hill invited him in for an interview. ``He was building his firm when everyone else was scaling back,'' recalls Harwood, now the firm's point-man for the Henry Street project and Matewan, among others.
``We've had some tough times here, but what I like about Dave is he's really dedicated. At a time when it would have been easy to let a few people go, he taught school just to make the payroll."
Hill practices true total quality management - which is to say, he hires quality people, then trusts them to do their work. The firm's current office, crammed into a second-story downtown building at 20 E. Campbell Ave., barely contains its 12 employees.
Sketches and blueprints are propped up in every corner. A giant antique washing machine - a leftover from the dry cleaners below - stands behind the receptionist's desk, too big to move. Hill designed the office around it.
``We use it as a coat hanger,'' says David's mother, Sue Hill, a former federal probation officer who also joined the firm after retiring last year. She answers phones, writes proposals and runs errands.
``I cleaned out three closets and called David and said, `Please volunteer me,''' she says, describing her retirement. ``My cat would have no fur left if I'd stayed home another week.''
Workaholism runs in the Hill family. David works 70 hours a week on projects, arriving at the office at 5 or 6 in the morning and staying till 7 p.m., when he goes home to be with his wife and their 3-year-old, Elizabeth. Helen, a part-time preservationist for the firm, works as a consultant for Roanoke City's historic review office.
Hill Studio typically works on 70 active projects at a time. The demanding pace was partly why landscape architect Laura Orrison left two months ago to start the firm Whitesell and Orrison. ``He's a hard worker, and he hopes for the same, but as families have come along, you realize you can't put in the same kind of hours as you used to,'' Orrison says. Still, she considers Hill a ``wonderful mentor.''
When she gave notice that she was quitting, ``It was really hard for him not to take it personally, it's such a huge part of his life. He takes everything about it personally."
Hill wouldn't discuss Orrison's departure, except to say: ``That's one that still leaves a lump in my throat.'' |n n| Around the office, it's known as the ``meeting from hell.''
The projector went out. The microphones weren't working right.
And the Hill Studio-designed plan to turn Henry Street into an entertainment district was met with outrage and disgust by many black Roanokers.
``We were a little bit naive," Don Harwood concedes. "We didn't know the feelings were as strong as they were.''
In hindsight, he wishes they had sought community input before announcing the proposal. ``Unfortunately what was presented was buildings and a plan, and it looked like a done deal. Everybody got caught up in it, and ... the perception of the whole thing went awry.''
With the project now at a standstill, Harwood believes "it's time to recognize the serious complaints and sit down with both sides and get constructive."
In three separate interviews, Hill seemed repeatedly perplexed by black residents' reaction to the proposal. ``People don't understand where the process is. We're still in the very beginning stages,'' he said. The media overplayed the sentiment and downplayed the preliminary status of the report, he added, noting that it was Hill Studio's goal all along to solicit residents' opinions.
One Roanoker who attended the meeting summarized the feelings later like this: ```Here are the yuppie white folks co-opting our heritage and making it a pseudo, let's-go-down-to-Henry-Street and listen to some blues and slum with the black folk.' And after everything they've been through with urban renewal, the black community resents it.''
Says architect Rife: ``I think the whole group Dave was working for has badly underestimated that emotion. Dave Hill is a nice guy and a sensitive man and would not hurt anyone's feelings, and I suspect he truly, truly does not understand what's been thrown at him - because the guy is a Boy Scout.''
Evelyn Bethel, the Gainsboro activist, says the Henry Street situation is a symptom of a ``very, very detrimental illness in this city'' that started with the demolition of black communities in Northeast Roanoke and Gainsboro, and continues today. She and others would like the plan to offer more opportunities for black entrepreneurs.
``People here are crying out for a neighborhood and a sense of community," she says.
"The whole set-up on Henry Street was wrong, and it's not David Hill's fault. He impresses me as being one who's concerned about people, but I also think he does what his clients hire him to do.''
The issue's become such a hot button that Hill rarely goes anywhere that someone doesn't bring it up. ``Helen was in the hospital recently, and the doctor came up to me and said, `Oh, Henry Street, here's how to make it a better plan,''' he says.
Henry Street wasn't the first hornet's nest Hill Studio found itself knee-deep in. More than a year earlier, the city moved two houses and demolished five businesses in order to widen Wells Avenue and beautify Hotel Roanoke's entrance. When Hill designed the ``afghan'' concept of the hillside overlooking Wells Avenue - where the houses had formerly been - the idea was to create ``a bond not a banner,'' he says.
Not everyone in Gainsboro was impressed. ``The pretty designs are nothing but wallpaper over a very deep hole,'' one activist said at the time.
For his work on the controversial power line project, Hill frequently flies over rural Southwest Virginia, where he shoots video and scans the region. Back in his office, he pores over maps trying to identify the sites that would have the least impact on people, animals and properties.
``What we do, some of it's gardens and things people wanna see, and some of it's sightings people would rather not see. ... We take that as a challenge.''
Hill was also instrumental in working with insurance executive Steve Musselwhite and developer Len Boone to design a more environment-friendly plan for building next to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The compromise called for the developments to contain 101 housing units on 38 acres, instead of the traditional 180 homes.
``That's of national significance,'' Rife says. ``What Dave has done is show Len a way to make as much money and be a hero at the same time.'' |n n| The parkway and David Hill share a history. Hill recalls as a teen-ager meeting Robert Hope, the parkway's chief landscape architect and a friend of his dad's. ``I never knew landscape architecture existed before.''
Growing up, he was drawn to art and architecture, but preferred being outdoors on his family's Bent Mountain farm. As a Virginia Tech undergrad, he spent summers interning on the parkway, documenting views, houses and farms for the park service's land-use maps.
Later, he and a Tech professor collaborated as curators of a traveling national exhibit on the parkway's construction and design. Hill was 28.
``We were trying to get across what these guys were thinking when the Depression hit,'' Hill recalls.
Another area he's studied extensively is the 328-mile I-81 corridor. Hill worked for the I-81 Corridor Council, coming up with guidelines so communities could express their towns' identities along their exits - and promote tourism.
The project has received national attention in several planning journals. ``The idea that you can study something that big and that diverse, and come up with a plan intrigues a lot of people,'' Hill says. ``We're getting calls from all over the place.''
Hill says he has ``100 ideas for Roanoke.'' He'd like to see the city capitalize on its railroad heritage, for instance.
``You can stand in one place downtown and see the Hotel, the great passenger station, the shops where they built the great steam engines, and it's so simple and beautiful,'' he says.
``There are museums now in Belgium and France with arts shops with big O. Winston Link photos. In Europe this is a rage. But here it's real life, so it's taken for granted.''
Traditionally, the Appalachian region hasn't developed many rules for landscape architecture. Hill remembers a Tech professor who called Roanoke ``a diamond in the rough'' because of the comparably slim attention given to its public landscapes.
Like most everything presented to David Hill, ``I took that as a challenge,'' he says.
LENGTH: Long : 257 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. 1. Landscape architect David Hillby CNBposes in front of one of his designs, the Wells Avenue hillside,
opposite Hotel Roanoke. 2. Regional projects from the Hill Studio
include (clockwise from top): The Hofhaugher Garden at Explore. 3.
The gate closure at Roanoke's Second Presyterian Church courtyard;
4. Galax Downtown Revitalization, for which one of Hill's goals was
to save the town Christmas Tree. color. KEYWORDS: PROFILE