For a young architect in Philadelphia, 1972 was a bad year to be starting a business.
Andy Byrnes put himself through architecture school by building houses, and he enjoyed every minute of it. When he moved to Phoenix after graduation, his priorities were to get his contractor's license and track adown fellow Tulane alumnus Richard Fairbourn.
Architect Jim Zack got his first taste of construction when he was 16. He liked it so much he continued to work as a carpenter for five years before heading off to the University of California at Berkeley. “Architecture was a natural extension of what I had been doing,” he says.
In the nearly four decades since BCJ began in 1965, it has become renowned for an unusually broad and well-received range of work.
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