DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997                TAG: 9704170161

SECTION: CAROLINA COAST          PAGE: 08   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: BEACH PEOPLE 

SOURCE: BY JACK DEMPSEY, CORRESPONDENT 

DATELINE: KITTY HAWK                        LENGTH:  103 lines

RETIRED HOSPITAL ARCHITECT KEEPS CONSULTING OVERSEAS.

For Armand Burgun, retirement is just a dull word in the dictionary.

The 71-year-old Outer Banks architect refuses to give up - or even slow down - the work that has carried him around the world in a quest to build better hospitals.

And in the little free time that he manages to eek out of each whirlwind week, this energetic, elderly man performs in a barbershop quartet, sings in a church choir, enjoys sailing, plays golf as often as possible, remodels his recently acquired home, attends local Kiwanis Club activities and takes computer courses at the College of the Albemarle.

Although there isn't a hospital within an hour's drive of his barrier island home, Burgun still stays active with his health complex design work by volunteering as a hospital construction consultant for the U.S. State Department. And he chairs a national committee which is re-writing guidelines on health facility construction for the American Institute of Architects.

``Life has been good to me,'' Burgun said recently from his Martin's Point home, headquarters of his volunteer endeavors. ``So now it's payback time.''

Throughout his professional career, Burgun played major and minor roles in the construction or modernization of about 150 U.S. hospitals.

He was the supervising architect during the design and construction of the world's largest medical complex in Iraq.

And his post-retirement credentials as a volunteer consultant on hospital architecture include projects in four foreign countries.

It seems incongruous that such a polite, soft-spoken, gentlemanly person could have thrived in the highly competitive business world of New York City and the explosive atmosphere of third-world countries.

Burgun describes receiving a thank-you watch from Saddam Hussein - which he still wears - with the same emotion as he describes singing baritone in a local quartet.

He appears to enjoy the company of 19-year-old classmates in his community college courses as much as he does rubbing shoulders with top government officials around the world.

His ultra-neat study seems too small and too sparsely furnished to contain the memories and working materials of an internationally recognized hospital architect and author of architectural works.

Burgun's highly visible career both began and nearly ended during World War II. A torpedo sunk his Coast Guard ship in the North Atlantic. All but 28 of the 212 crew members perished.

Yet, in a family drained by medical bills, the GI Bill after the war enabled him to pursue undergraduate and graduate studies in architecture at Columbia University.

By 1955, Burgun had been named assistant director of the New York State Joint Hospital Survey and Planning Commission. ``Very little hospital construction or modernization was done during World War II,'' he said. ``So the federal Hill-Burton Act funneled funds through state government to help localities upgrade their facilities.''

Burgun's experience administering those funds earned him a partnership in 1960 in a prestigious New York City firm that became Rogers, Butler and Burgun Architects. He remained in the firm until he first tried to retire in 1988. He still returns to help out from time to time.

The biggest challenge Burgun said he faced during his high-octane life as a hospital architect was overseeing the design and construction of Baghdad Medical City on the banks of Iraq's Tigris River. Five hospitals, a nursing home, a conference center, living quarters, schools of nursing and medicine, and many smaller buildings comprise the sprawling complex. Burgun worked on that project from 1974 until 1990.

Like so many other Outer Banks retirees, Burgun first rented a vacation cottage on the barrier islands, then purchased a pre-retirement home and finally settled in post-retirement quarters in Kitty Hawk's most upscale community.

He calls Dare County home now. But his volunteer work still frequently carries him to foreign countries where he provides hands-on consultation for hospital construction projects. ``It requires a minimum commitment of two months for each project,'' he said of his State Department work. ``And they (the federal Agency for International Development) don't give you much notice. Once they gave me 10 hours notice to board a plane for South America for an extended tour.''

Burgun has completed projects in Columbia and Jordan and has continuing projects in Ecuador and Morocco. Some of those foreign facilities include foreign notions to most American health care professionals. An Ecuadorian hospital Burgun worked on, for example, has no elevators. Staff carry patients from floor to floor.

On the Outer Banks, where talk about building a local hospital seems to surface almost every year, Burgun said a comprehensive health care facility such as those he spent his life designing just wouldn't work.

``Although there may be enough demand for a major diagnostic and treatment facility, or a birthing center, there just isn't enough demand here for a hospital,'' he said. ``It wouldn't be first-rate.''

Burgun and his wife, Muriel, have much more work to accomplish than they have time on their hands. One of their children is employed at a Brooklyn medical center and the other teaches theater at Indiana University. So between visiting family - and keeping up with international hospital consulting demands - this busy would-be retiree barely even has time to open a dictionary, much less read the definition of retirement. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by JACK DEMPSEY

Armand Burgun exhibits some of the mementos of his adventurous life:

a bronze plaque of Baghdad Medical City; the gavel he used to chair

construction meetings; his Coast Guard Reserve nameplate, to name a

few.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu