briefcase

trendsetter

ARCHITECTURE’S HIGH ROAD
El Taller Colaborativo’s Alex Garcia fights the architectural outsourcing trend to keep designs in harmony with their surroundings and in tune with clients’ needs.

In his third year at college, Alex Garcia threw caution and his scholarship to the wind and said adios to the Illinois Institute of Technology, having realized that his vision of architectural freedom was out of sync with the school’s rigid Bauhaus roots.
Today he guides his own architecture firm, El Taller Colaborativo or ETC, with the same free spirit.
In Garcia’s view, architecture is fundamental to civilization in both an aesthetic and functional sense, and you either do it right, or suffer.
Back in his home borough of Manhattan, he found the right environment for completing his degree at City College of New York, additionally inspiring because of CCNY’s location “in one of the greatest experiments in urban planning and architecture in the world.”
The theory, the lore, the history of architecture captivated him at the time and “I was a professional student for awhile,” he says, describing the era when he earned two master’s degrees, one for Transportation Planning and Engineering at Polytechnic University of New York and the second in Urban Design at CCNY, all while working full time.
Idealism is ingrained in Garcia’s reverence for architecture, and he and co-founder Luis Sanchez, PE, pooled the resources of a group of friends who were either architects or engineers to form a studio structured as a collective: El Taller Colaborativo. It was an admirable concept but “more theoretical than practical.” After two other false starts, the firm was organized as a professional corporation in March 1985 by Garcia and Sanchez. Sanchez retired in 2002 and is currently Lower Manhattan Borough Commissioner.
El Taller Colaborativo started out humbly enough, with Garcia working from his living room in Union City on a pair of Apple computers that he and Sanchez called their “startup capital.”
The first two years were hard, and El Taller Colaborativo made so little money that Garcia’s wife only half-jokingly referred to it as a hobby. Luckily Muriel was there to keep the wolf from the door—she had a full-time job with great medical benefits at the time—while providing the emotional boost and belief in the firm’s future that Garcia needed.
Without that, Garcia says, “I would have thrown in the towel after just one year.”
ETC’s first big project was a city sidewalk and streetscape improvement project, but unfortunately, he says, it was “not a profitable project, and in fact, the draftsman earned more money than either Sanchez or I did that year.”
A year later, he sold the house and went through the expense of setting up an office in the same town. It was a gamble, but he decided to give it a couple of years.
He soon found he’d played a winning hand. ETC landed a contract with Raytheon as architects for 21 of the 23 stations on New Jersey Transit’s Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit System, a passenger service in northern New Jersey. Soon the company had enough accounts receivable to sustain a payroll that included 45 people, a number that fluctuates yearly depending on the firm’s contracts. Five years ago ETC moved its headquarters onwards and upwards to Newark, New Jersey.
“We have designed a lot for mass transit facilities—most recently the last station on the monorail system at Liberty International Airport that connects to the Northeast Corridor, a $45 million railway station,” he says.
The number of ETC projects is impressive, with clients including such giant private corporations as Prudential Financial and Altria. Most, however, have come from the public sector such as schools, a number of federal government projects including one for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, plus a lot of work for state, county and municipal authorities, particularly low-income housing and traffic/transit solutions. Garcia says the public sector is an easier bet to break into than the corporate world—it’s less who you know than what know—and you just come in and compete. To date ETC has planned and designed more than 300 projects ranging in construction value from $5,000 to $600 million.
For each project, ETC supplies all the skill required, from architecture, civil engineering and construction management to interior design, landscape architecture, vertical transportation and more. In other words, hands on every step of the way.
Why? Because in Alex Garcia’s view, architecture has come to a fork in the road. One way heads towards a cost-slashing outsourcing remote-control operation in which floor plans and façade designs arrive on the cheap via Internet from some less developed part of the world. That is not the direction Garcia wants to go.
“Architecture is becoming a commodity,” Garcia says. “Companies located halfway around the world in China and India offered to do our drafting and design. We’re avoiding that trend of becoming a commodity to be obtained at the lowest price.”
He and his current partners Milan Patel, PE, and Francisco Ruela, RA, are determined to take the high road by emphasizing quality and taking an equity stake in development projects.
The firm is also placing a huge emphasis on so-called “green” development, which takes into consideration conservations and environmental concerns. To do so, it is using techniques and professionals accredited by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council. ETC is a member of the national and New Jersey chapter of the organization and currently has five projects seeking LEED certification.
A particular source of pride is the $265 million Corona Maintenance and Car Wash Facility for New York City Transit, because it is the only facility of its kind in the United States that is formally LEED certified by the USGBC.
The firm’s idealism is reflected in other ways, too, like in giving back to the community by donating modular-home designs to Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit that builds housing for the disadvantaged. Garcia also serves on the boards of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the United States Hispanic Advocacy Association.
With idealism, vision and practicality, there is no doubt Garcia is not only doing what he wants, but is doing it his way. In fact, he describes his greatest satisfaction as “making my own destiny. As my dad would say, ‘Mejor cabeza de ratón que cola de león.’”

DOSSIER

Name: Alex Garcia
Age: 55
Position: President, Principal and Founding Partner
Company: El Taller Colaborativo, PC (ETC)
Employees: 45
Specialties: Architecture, Engineering, Civil/Landscape Architecture, Interior Design, and Construction Management
Gross annual revenue: $5.5 million
Clients: (Partial list) Prudential Financial; Altria, Jersey City, Newark and Paterson Public Schools; Rutgers University; U.S. Military Academy/West Point; U.S. Postal Service; Elizabeth, Hoboken, Irvington, Jersey City, Newark, NYC and Paterson Housing Authorities; MTA Long Island Railroad; MTA New York City Transit; Amtrak; Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Education: New York City College (B.S., Arch. and M.S., Urban Planning); Polytechnic University of New York (M.S., Transportation Planning and Engineering)
Descent: Cuban
Family: Wife Muriel Garcia; daughters Marielle Rebecca Garcia and Ileana Maria Garcia
Quote: “Architecture is becoming a commodity. ... We’re avoiding that trend.”