Bert Haglund’s first big project as an architectural graduate sounds a bit like a studio pitch for an offbeat sitcom. It involves a tiki-lounge theme restaurant on the shores of frozen Lake Minnetonka and a guy known as “Bamboo Bob.”
“I remember seeing Nick doing all his research,” Bert says, referring to his first boss—and Design Two, Inc. founder—Nick Ruehl. The legacy firm later became EOS Architecture and ultimately merged with TSP, Inc. in 1994, when Nick and Bert joined Team TSP as principals. “Nick went down to Florida to meet with a fellow who really knew this stuff—he lived and breathed it. And our job was to bring a little bit of Polynesia to the frigid north of Excelsior Bay. It most recently was an event center, but it survived many years as the Mai Tai and was quite the destination.”
In the decades since then, Bert’s taken quite the career journey. His colleagues in TSP’s Excelsior office made sure Nick was there last week to help celebrate Bert’s 40-year milestone with the firm. The two men were partners in EOS, and that early engagement with the life of the company formed the basis for Bert’s owner-leader philosophy.
“When you have good work coupled with good relationships, that’s really rewarding.”
— Bert Haglund, Senior Architect
“I was vested and very invested in this group pretty early in my career,” Bert says, “and with that, I suppose, comes a certain mindset that this isn’t just a job. It’s about creating this place—and you’re going to stick it out through thick and thin because it’s partly yours. That’s how I’ve operated from that point. And through good luck and working with good people, it’s all carried on from one year to the next and the next.”
The same is true of Bert’s specialization in educational design. He didn’t intentionally focus on the K-12 market, but his work on projects for districts in Minnetonka, Wayzata, and surrounding communities certainly helped establish the firm as a major player in the field by the early 1990s. Bert was able to leverage his effort on small assignments into significant contracts for large-scale capital improvements. He’s continued to make relationship-based client service a hallmark of his personal approach to design.
“When you have good work coupled with good relationships, that’s really rewarding,” he says. “So I’ve done what I can to take those opportunities to enjoy the experience of it and the people.”
That motivation is particularly evident in the way Bert took care of small things for a client who ultimately selected the firm for a $20 million new facility. Intermediate District 287 was transforming itself in the process, changing how it delivered education to students and moving from leasing its properties to owning them.
“This was really exciting because it was the first building they would own, and it was a real manifestation of how they wanted to operate differently,” Bert says of the South Education Center project. “We got to help them with all of that, and I got to build on an institutional relationship with the client as well as a personal relationship with a school leader I’d worked with previously at another district.”
Bert’s learned from every project along the way and every colleague. It’s a give and take, he says, gleaning knowledge from those around him and sharing decades of experience when he feels it can add value to fit the project. “What I would like to do is be part of helping people do their best,” Bert says. “Right now we’re busy. We have projects to work on to do the best we can each time. We have to ask, ‘What’s it going to take?’ We need to decide to do our best, do good work, set an example, and make that our business as usual. That’s what I want to create before I hang up my spurs.”
