There’s people who question at times whether I work for Epic or I work for Cullen. And that’s the way I think it should be. I’m providing a service to them and I need to understand their business as much as I can.
It’s literally millions of square feet and it’s all different kinds of things You have auditoriums. You have teaching classrooms. You have high tech conference rooms. A campus is the best description We were really struggling with what’s the next great thing to do. This building is called as a double entendre Deep Space. Deep Space being deep underground and Deep Space being the farthest that the Hubble telescope can see.
The structure is amazing. We have beams that are 278 feet long and 24 feet deep over our heads here as we sit in this theater. It turned out that the easiest way to construct the roof was to build it on the ground and lift it into place 70 feet. It happened to be one of them fall days where the temperature dropped to like 18 overnight. So in the morning it was everybody is all excited to go and we went “uh!” and all the hydraulics were frozen.
I remember getting there. All the pumps were frozen. And there wasn’t, it was almost as though, “Well the pumps are frozen. That’s a minor incident.” And so guys were running around with blow torches and literally, you know, making ice into water. And “bump!” off we went. I think that’s a good hallmark of Cullen too, that they thought the pumps frozen was a minor obstacle, and off we went. It was just amazing. If there were five days in my architectural career that were amazing, that was certainly one of them. The euphoric of, you know, we really accomplished this. I mean those are the wins. Those are the successes. Those are the things that you gotta have on the interim throughout the project. What we really should do is put on a rock concert in here. It would be awesome. The sound system is amazing.
