Meet Craig Vickers

For 35 of our 40 years, Craig Vickers has been a central part of Civitas, shaping much of our work, helping us grow, and inspiring us to keep working toward making cities better. In our latest ‘Perspectives’ blog post, Craig reflects on his path to Civitas, and on what he hopes the future holds. Meet Craig:

I joined Civitas in 1990. I grew up in Colorado and went to college at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, so—after working a few years in New Hampshire and Rhode Island—joining Civitas in Denver felt like coming home. At the time, I wasn’t able to articulate my passion so clearly, but I knew that I was looking for a firm that was interested in the public realm as a catalyst for making urban life better. I wanted to work on projects that mattered: places and spaces that have an impact on people’s lives.

I could tell right away in the interview process that Civitas was different from other firms, and I was intrigued by the big, meaty questions that both Mark Johnson and Todd Johnson were asking me. It was clear they were more interested in knowing whether I approached my work with curiosity than in my portfolio, since I was still green. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was getting into, but I knew I wanted to try it.

I didn’t follow a direct path to landscape architecture. In fact, when I started at Colorado State, I’d been interested in golf course management. In high school, I had an opportunity to work at The International golf tournament in Castle Pines, where I talked to the people who took care of the grass. They encouraged me to consider CSU’s turf management program in the agriculture school, and it sounded perfect.

I’ll never forget my very first day there: it was a super hot 90+ degree day and we were sitting in a 2-hour lecture inside an old ROTC building. I knew right away this wasn’t for me after all. I needed to be hands on. I met with the dean of the agriculture school, who noticed my drawings. I’d taken drafting classes in high school, too, and had won a statewide competition for something I’d drawn. So he encouraged me to consider the landscape design and construction program instead of turf management. And this time, it stuck.

I discovered quickly that I had a mind for design thinking. Teachers like Angelo Simeoni saw something in me and encouraged me to try different things, and I got deeply interested in design and construction. I loved conceiving of something and figuring out how to build it. This experience also introduced me to landscape architecture and working at the urban scale—very different from the design-focused landscapes for small spaces that I’d been exposed to so far. So I embraced urban design as an independent study, working hard to build my portfolio in order to compete for jobs.

When I graduated, I felt proud of the portfolio I’d assembled, and looked for ways to expand it even further. I worked for a resort planner first, and then for the late Albert Veri, who led a boutique firm in Rhode Island. Veri was a wonderful teacher of design and aesthetics. Through this work, integrating beautiful parks, plazas and public spaces at very large scales, I developed my love of urban places. And I went on to Civitas from there.

This emphasis on ideas and on our process of design thinking has been part of Civitas from the start. It’s central to what’s attracted everyone here, whether we know it or not. I remember talking to my wife Kaycee about this in my early days here: there’s just something different about Civitas. It’s always been a patient place where we take the time to vet ideas with our peers and talk about the merits of those ideas.

This dialog of design always leads us to something fruitful, and it’s been consistent since the day I started in 1990. The technology has changed, of course. The types of talent within our team has ebbed and flowed too. But we’ve learned through many cycles and have honed a process that leaves ample room for curiosity, ideating, testing, refining, debating. We challenge each other to clarify our ideas and make things right—to make sure things are connecting and generating holistic benefits, socially, financially and ecologically. And we keep going. We’re all motivated to keep getting better at this.

This is why Civitas was appealing to me at the beginning, and it’s why I’m still here. The design practice has evolved dramatically since I started. We drew everything by hand. Sent sketches to our clients via fax. Rushed to get design packages out the door in time for the 5pm FedEx pickup. Then eventually had two CAD stations in the office that 15 of us shared. It’s been an interesting time to learn.

I’m almost addicted to the creative process—staring down a problem and testing, sorting, putting things in their place—so I love projects that have this quality to them. I hope that our work will be special for people, giving the community something to evolve around, and I get most fulfillment from the projects that allow me to be really creative.

Though it’s not yet been built, our designs for the San Diego Convention Center felt important and were very fulfilling for me. The existing convention center sits on the waterfront, but since it’s a big box, it creates a sort of wall between downtown San Diego and the water. The proposed project was an expansion of that building, and was initially envisioned as a tall, glassy jewel box on the waterfront. The challenge, though, was that this posed a risk of cutting off the city from the water even further. So we recommended a different approach that would allow San Diego to embrace its prime amenity, the waterfront.

Our strategy was to develop a low profile building that stretched between the city’s edge and the water’s edge. The interior convention floor would be the largest in the country. Outside, the exterior would be activated to draw in pedestrians and the convention center roof would become a 5-acre park overlooking the bay. Below grade, aligned with underground parking, we’d also manage the flow of brackish groundwater and stormwater runoff and treat it through terraced baffles that naturally filter the water as it flows back into the bay.

Projects like this have a catalytic force built into the design: creating a better building within a park environment that connects the city with water and nature. This is just one example, but almost all of our projects have a similar impact at different scales.

I can’t help but notice that the younger talent coming into the industry has been trained to rely more heavily on digital technologies. These tools produce incredible results—beautiful renderings and more—and AI is expanding on this to a degree it’s hard to wrap our heads around. So we certainly need to keep learning how to leverage these technologies to make our work better.

For me, though, I believe we need to keep human needs at the center of our work. My goal is to continue contributing a human touch to our work. The more we get detached from the creative act and let our computers do it for us, the greater our risk of creating places that are soulless. As humans ourselves, we need to keep creating—the ideating and debating and refining that’s always been such a big part of Civitas—rather than simply learning how to manage the programs and tools that disconnect us from that more human-centric design process.