Less than two weeks into his new job at TSP, Jarod Greenwood already has a nickname.
“They’re calling me JT,” he says of colleagues in the Rapid City office. There’s a practical purpose: avoiding confusion-in-conversation with CEO Jared Nesje.
Greenwood joined TSP Sept. 24 as an architectural graduate reporting to Mark Averett. The South Dakota native served in the U.S. Army, spent time in his family’s construction business, and co-owned an art gallery—all before earning his Master of Architecture at Montana State University.
First, though, Greenwood was supposed to get his PhD in genetic engineering.
“I was tired of being in a lab by myself, honestly,” says Greenwood, who was well on his way to an advanced degree from UC Santa Cruz’s Genomics Institute. “My family has a background in construction and property management, so I started building houses and high-end horsebarns, of all things. I thought I’d take a year and not do school again right away. That turned in to two or three.”
Greenwood had plenty to keep him busy. He’s an artist who draws, paints, and sculpts—with a top prize from the Colorado State Fair to prove it: His 13-foot-tall metal horse skeleton was a representational metaphor for Western society. Greenwood partnered with his best friend, a 65-year-old welder and art teacher, to open the Colorado gallery. During that time, they built metal sculptures and Greenwood worked construction jobs.
“One day I was freezing my tail off, wondering, ‘Why am I wearing fingerless gloves in negative-degree weather when I could be in the construction trailer looking at drawings?’ And that’s when it hit me that I should think about architecture.”
The decision took him to Bozeman, MT, where he served as a teacher’s assistant leading graphics and structure classes while pursuing his own diploma. Architecture fused his artistic bent with the practical knowledge he gained in construction. It was the right path at the wrong time: He graduated in 2010, right after the economy collapsed.
“It’s pretty hard to get a good job when you’re competing with 10-year architects who are getting laid off from their firms, and you’re walking in the door as a new grad,” Greenwood says. His persistence paid off. Each new position—often in a new city—offered better projects and better pay. He worked his way back to South Dakota, landing with another firm in Rapid City. The location is a midpoint between his parents in Sioux Falls and his brother and sister-in-law in Montana.
Greenwood wants to continue his learning at TSP. He’s particularly interested in hospital design and medical design, in general. He sees a huge opportunity in assisted-living facilities and retirement complexes, where baby boomers are choosing to downscale while they’re still highly active.
“It’s much more like a community. It’s a really interesting approach,” says Greenwood, whose grandmother lives in a facility with similar amenities. “You can have a great life in an apartment-living center but then there are doctors and clinic services on site if when you need something more.”
When Greenwood gets a bright idea about how to make a healing environment better, he has family and friends in healthcare to help vet his ideas. He envisions a time very soon when town-center style retirement communities will be the standard most retirees expect. He compares it to the family-focused model that hospitals have merged with hospitality-industry components, including system-owned hotels and extended-care units. “There’s a weird kind of synergy going on right now,” he says. “It’s really smart.”