David Sweere: Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects

As a member of the Air National Guard David Sweere has twice been deployed to Kuwait, which put his architectural studies on hold. This experience, he says, “really made me crave school, and really appreciate school.” After completing his five-year Bachelor of Architecture degree, he hopes to attend graduate school in the big city – New York, Chicago, Boston – and his summer internship with architecture firm Polk Stanley Wilcox is a big step in that direction.

Polk Stanley Wilcox has offices in Little Rock and Fayetteville. The Fayetteville office employs 12 people, three of whom were once summer interns. The firm is responsible for some of the most recognizable buildings in the state, including the Heifer International Headquarters in Little Rock. Closer to home, designs include the new campus housing office and the firm’s first major project — the First National Bank building, a 1970s-era building that defines the east side of the downtown Fayetteville square.

This summer Sweere is working primarily on a redesign of the interior layout and finishes in the historic Massey building just off Bentonville’s downtown square, which will house a work-sharing space and a mezcal bar. The project comes with many challenges, but chief among them is preservation: the design team must figure out how to integrate modern-day engineering systems into a turn-of-the-century structure. According to Craig Curzon, one of the principals in the Fayetteville office of the firm, Sweere “has been very critical to [this] project,” doing most of the construction drawings for the redesign.

“I’m learning a lot,” Sweere says, “Things you don’t really get in school.” He was particularly surprised to discover how interactive the field really is. “I didn’t realize how much an architect’s role is to coordinate. That’s been the most interesting part, getting to see how these different trades work together. You’re the center point, which I think is really cool.”

Architects are granted privileged peeks into the structure of people’s lives, and Sweere has enjoyed learning about the firm’s clients through this lens. “You get to talk to a lot of people, you get to learn about what they do. The environment you live in is really personal. It determines a lot about the way you function every day.”