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Be careful what you promise a kid. The New Jersey architect that certified Neil Frankel's Boy Scout Merit Badge in architecture, said "If you stick with this, you come around and see me for a job." Fresh from his first year of college, clad in a corduroy suit and a knit tie, that's what he did. "I want to be director of design," Frankel announced. That day, he became a director-of landscaping. His first task was to cut the grass.
Fast forward about 30 years. It's Frankel's first day at Perkins+Will in Chicago. He stops into the marketing department to look at the firm's body of work. He finds photographs of the Crow Island School in Winnetka, 111., a collaboration between Eliel Saarinen and Perkins+Will. Suddenly, he's taken back to the second grade, when he happened go to that school for a day while visiting his cousin. "The entire day from my childhood flashed in front of my eyes, and I realized the Crow Island School was actually the impetus to do this. I remember as a kid thinking 'it has a fireplace.' And in the auditorium, the seats changed in size as you go forward. So the big kids sat in back, the little kids in the front. It was extremely humanistic." So that's where it all began. "It's the only thing I ever wanted to do," he says categorically.
Passion certainly helped Frankel build his resume. After earning his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Illinois, he moved to Laguna Beach, Calif., where he started a firm. "It was half surfing, half architecture," he laughs. After being recruited by Milton Schwartz & Associates in Chicago, he was made partner at the age of 25, and went on to take over the firm. In 1980, he became associate principal at Swanke Hayden Connell's Chicago office, where he stayed for seven years before going on to be design principal for Perkins+Will (first in Chicago, then New York). He was director of interiors for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago before going on to start Frankel + Coleman in 1998 with his wife, Cindy Coleman. For the last five years, he has also taught at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee.