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Hyatt Regency skywalks designer Bob Berkebile is the godfather of green building

By Carolyn Szczepanski 

When Bob Berkebile rushed to the chaotic scene of the Hyatt Regency disaster, his first thought was, Did I kill these people?

It was the night of July 17, 1981. Berkebile and his wife, Libby, were on their way to a dinner party in the Lakewood neighborhood. As they rounded the southern edge of downtown Kansas City, the couple couldn't help but notice the wailing of sirens and a staggering parade of speeding firetrucks. When they arrived at the party, Berkebile says, the hostess met them in the yard and rushed them inside to the TV news reports.

At 7:05 that evening, as a live band began playing "Satin Doll" for hundreds of spectators and dancers, the fourth-story skywalks at the Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed, catapulting dozens of people into the air and sending twisted metal and slabs of concrete onto the packed lobby floor.

Berkebile jumped back in the car and rushed to the Hyatt. By the time he arrived, less than an hour after the collapse, the area was choked with shocked spectators and frantic family members. The entry was lined with police. Berkebile walked up to the first one he saw and told the officer who he was: the architect in charge of the hotel's design.

He was ushered inside. Pipes torn away from the walls pumped water onto the scene. Arms and legs jutted from the debris. Police officers tried to extract lifeless victims in blood-soaked clothing; fatal gashes left skulls exposed. Bodies piled up five-high on a wooden pallet in the corner of the dust- and exhaust-filled lobby. An adjoining conference room, prepared for a floral convention, quickly became a makeshift morgue.

Rain speckled the ambulances that buzzed between the Crown Center hotel and Truman Medical Center, until rescue workers delicately extracted the last survivor at 4:30 a.m. Three hours later, construction workers peeled away the last concrete slab, revealing 31 bodies. A police spokesman announced that all of the victims had been recovered.

The final count: 114 dead, 216 injured.

"I spent a really long night on the rescue team. And as we were pulling those dead people, those seriously injured people, out, I was confronting totally new questions," Berkebile says.

He had been one of two principal architects in charge of the design of the Hyatt skywalks. Not even 24 hours after the collapse, accusations flew from city officials and local architects: The design was flawed; any skilled practitioner could have seen that the airy bridges, suspended by just a handful of inch-thick steel rods, would fail. The lawsuits and investigations that followed ate up most of Berkebile's time for nearly two straight years. He spent more hours than he can count in conference rooms, staring at lawyers, going over what, up to that time, was the nation's most deadly structural failure.

"It was surreal, just ugly," Berkebile says of the legal process.

Tom Nelson, a partner in Berkebile's architecture firm, says he was convinced of two things in the aftermath of the collapse. First, he was certain that it wasn't the architects' fault. He was right. The National Bureau of Standards determined that the engineers, not the architects, had made a fatal mistake in calculating the strength of the hanger rods. But Nelson was also convinced that any company with a connection to the disaster would never resurrect its business.

"I went to an interview for a project two days after to make the point to the staff, to make a point to everybody that, despite this horrible thing, we were going to stay in business," he says. "But I didn't believe it."

Berkebile plunged into a personal investigation of his own. The judicial system couldn't hold him responsible for the deaths of those 114 people, but his conscience did. It was that pain and the desire to redeem himself and his profession, he says, that led him to question the nature of architecture.

"We were winning awards, but were we, in fact, improving [our clients'] well-being, their health, the vitality of their neighborhoods and the planet?" Berkebile recalls wondering. That wasn't easily answered. It had been more than a decade since the first Earth Day, but there was little discussion about the impact of buildings on the environment. The phrase green building wasn't part of the architectural lexicon, let alone a household term.

Berkebile helped change that. His determination not only kept his firm afloat but also positioned it at the front of a progressive — and profitable — new trend. In the past 25 years, Berkebile has moved from notoriety as the man in the middle of the Hyatt disaster to international respect as a key figure in making his industry more Earth-friendly.

For Berkebile, though, the stakes are still high. He may have changed the direction of his industry, but he's not done yet.

Berkebile started his architectural career building treehouses at his childhood home in the countryside of North Kansas City. His family lived on his grandfather's farm, a sprawling expanse with an orchard, a forest and a stream running through it. His mother planted one of the largest vegetable gardens in the city. His father was a third-generation German craftsman, a successful contractor who staked his name on frugality and conservation. "He taught me, 'Don't waste anything. Savor everything; reuse it,'" Berkebile says.

His family was politically conservative and attended the First Baptist Church of North Kansas City. Berkebile started questioning his religious upbringing in high school. By the time he left for the University of Kansas, he had rejected it completely. That void of inspiration was filled his sophomore year, though, when he was selected by the dean as one of 15 to study under famed architect Buckminster Fuller.

An early environmental activist, Fuller preached the value of resource conservation and was best-known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. Nearly half a century since he was under Fuller's tutelage, it's hard to spend an hour with Berkebile without some reference to "Bucky."

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