Tom Nelson (BNIM)
For the late Tom Nelson, architecture was a means to imagine a better life, not only for his clients but for the community and the civic realm at large.
Unlike the grand egos that dominate architectural history, Nelson, who died June 30 at the age of 90, was soft-spoken and humble, yet he still managed to become enormously influential.
A defining career moment occurred a half-century ago.
Nelson’s firm, then known as Patty Berkebile Nelson (now BNIM), was selected to design the Truman State Office Building in Jefferson City. Well, it was on the verge of being selected but the state building official thought the firm was too small and needed to be beefed up. Nelson and his colleagues, including Bob Berkebile, spent a weekend forming a collaboration with two other Kansas City firms, Monroe & Lefebvre and Duncan Architects. They successfully navigated the process by the Monday deadline and landed the job. Then came the clash of visions that revealed to everyone the genius of Tom Nelson.
Following a reorganization of the state government and a decision to consolidate numerous departments from a hodgepodge of rented office space, the state design and construction official wanted the new consortium to come up with a dramatic plan — a tower that would stand as the tallest building in Missouri.
Nelson, working alongside designers Bruce Patty and John Monroe, might have hemmed and hawed in those early discussions, but, as the story goes, he ultimately held the firm’s ground and said no. Why diminish the historic State Capitol? The Carthage marble-domed symbol and center of government would recede into the shadows of a neighboring tower, and the relatively harmonious streetscape of downtown Jefferson City would be needlessly disrupted.
Better, Nelson argued, would be a horizontally oriented building lower to the ground, which could also be organized more efficiently for both public-facing and internal government operations.
The $48 million Truman State Office Building, encompassing nearly 900,000 square feet, thus arrived in the early 1980s with its dramatic atrium on the diagonal, its generally open atmosphere and its abundant views of the Capitol. And it arrived over the vehement objections of Gov. Joe Teasdale, who complained that its supposedly extravagant features amounted to an “architect’s folly.” His budget veto, eventually overridden by the General Assembly, delayed construction by nearly two years.
A half-century later, the building still works well for its employees, we hear. Berkebile related a recent conversation with a state official, who told him, “This is the best place I’ve ever worked. You know, everybody here believes that.”
Looking back on the early Nelson episode, Berkebile said, “There are 20 examples like that, but it was always Tom looking at that unique place and time and saying, what’s right here? And it was always about making it a better place, more human, more connected, more beautiful.”
It has been nearly 25 years since one of Nelson’s most distinctive but underappreciated designs came to fruition. A pedestrian bridge and trail tower overlooking the Missouri River at the foot of Main Street still accommodates runners, cyclists and dog walkers. Freight trains rumble and squeal beneath the main level of the bridge, an assemblage of Cor-ten steel, heavy galvanized fencing and composite planking. “We wanted that industrial feeling that all that stuff down there has,” Nelson once said.
The Town of Kansas Bridge was conceived to link people with the city’s riverbank origin story. It was a well-intentioned move, and, as things happened, somewhat ahead of its time since the hoped-for riverfront redevelopment was slow to materialize.
Nelson once told me how early in his life, the Kansas City skyline appeared like a vision on family trips to the city from his birthplace in St. Joseph. As his career took hold, he had one of the rarest of chances to make his mark on that symbolic vista.
As his firm put it in a statement, “Tom changed the form and operations of Kansas City and its skyline.” Nelson led the design of One Kansas City Place (1988), yes, a skyscraper, but something like an echo in glass of City Hall. Along with other built projects, he offered a key voice on the Downtown Council and the City Plan Commission. The Crossroads, the streetcar — he contributed a sense of human scale in the evolving urban environment.
BNIM principal Steve McDowell, who arrived at the firm as the state office building was being born, recalled Nelson’s notable emphasis on “the space between the buildings.”What it meant was that making a building is one thing, but you have to pay attention to the streetscape — maybe you’re also incorporating a park or a garage. “The building,” McDowell said, “has a responsibility to its public side.”
In a statement from the firm, McDowell said Nelson “was also an extraordinary human being who understood that his decisions and actions, as a person and as an architect, mattered and would have an impact far beyond his lifetime.”
That perennial influence shows up in the work of untold numbers of next-generation architects and designers.
Dan Maginn, an alum of BNIM now at Dake Wells, said Nelson’s legacy lives on “in the dozens, hundreds, probably — of people in our profession who learned from him. His voice, his pursuit of design excellence, his drive to do things right, and his unique abilities are instilled in me as I continue forward in my own career.
“I was telling some people the other day what it was like to work with Tom. I said his sketches were like Beatles songs. They came forth, somehow, fully realized — loose but structured, absolutely complete … almost as if he were copying a drawing that already existed. The sketches evoked the emotion and feel of a place, but importantly, they were also full of clues about how to actually build it. We young BNIM’ers back in the day would pore over those sketches — and his accompanying well-chosen words and similarly meaningful throat-clearings — and maybe, with time, get ourselves to a place where our details would ‘scour,’ as he put it. Scrubbed clean of all the stuff that wasn’t essential.
“I miss him, but I’m glad he’s still with me every day.”
