Promoting, protecting and restoring local buildings

Christopher Coe left Ruston in his rearview mirror when he was 24 years old and still a year away from a five-year architecture degree at Louisiana Tech.

Destination? The bright lights of the Big Apple.

Along for the ride? $300 and a dream. "When you're young, failure is not on your radar," Coe remembered. "I just knew I was going to be able to get a job somewhere. But my goal really was, number one, experience New York, and number two, what I knew about New York was everybody that goes there, goes there for a specific reason, and they're usually career-driven, and everyone is pretty helpful in making introductions to other jobs. If you don't get a job at one firm, somebody will say, 'Hey, go talk to this guy at another firm,’ which was remarkably true.'"

So, after two weeks of sleeping on the floor of a friend of a friend of a friend's loft in Manhattan's Flower District, Coe received three job offers. He ended up staying in New York City for two years, working for two of the world's most famous architects, Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier. Gwathmey "was doing the addition to Frank Lloyd's Guggenheim in New York, and when I was working for Richard Meier, he won the $1 billion commission to do the Getty Museum in Los Angeles."

With that high-brow experience, Coe eventually returned to Tech and earned his diploma before graduating from Yale University. Then, he spent 33 years on the West Coast, designing buildings in the United States and some internationally. But just because you spend more than three decades somewhere doesn't mean you love it.

"I never particularly liked Los Angeles," Coe said. "It sounds strange to say, I didn't like the weather – it was quite monotonous to me. But (Los Angeles) was a great place to be for my career – for my business. But all along, since Tech and Yale and New York and the Getty, I always intended to come back to Shreveport.”

And in 2018, the Airline High School graduate – born at Barksdale Air Force Base, the son of a career airman – did just that. Coe planned to retire, but his love of architecture – mainly restoring buildings – wouldn't let him.

"Shreveport has a very deep and rich architectural legacy," Coe said. "We have often done some really dumb things and not honored that legacy. I made a pact with myself that if I came home, I was going to be very committed to try to promote, protect and restore the architectural legacy here in Shreveport."

To that end, Coe is involved with two major projects. Come to think of it, "involved" is an understatement. He is the chief architect for the $5 million renovation of the Greater Shreveport Chamber of Commerce building, as well as for the design of the Northwest Louisiana State Office Building, which is a renovation of the old Joe D. Waggoner building.

"The city has done some really notso-great things with some very nice buildings," Coe passionately said. "That's why (the Chamber) project is so important to me. This is not only saving a building so it can live past our lives and into the next 100 years but also to really become – I would hope – the benchmark and the catalyst for other people to realize we have some great, historic buildings here. We have to stop doing dumb things. We need to revere them, protect them and reuse them."

Coe feels the same way about the former Waggoner building.

"I know it's a strange thing for an architect like me to say, but sometimes new construction to many people means progress. That is often a myth. When you build a lot of new things, and they're done for the wrong reason or put in the wrong location, progress is an illusion.

It is not real at all. We've done that in Shreveport in the time I was gone. We've built an entirely new town 15 miles away from town."

The 64-year-old doesn't have anything against building "new." In fact, he's designing two new buildings. But every new building doesn't have to be "new."

"It is madness to think that we have to keep building new buildings in Shreveport, when we have so many great buildings which exist that can be reused."

In case you can't tell, that 24-yearold's dream came true. And now in his 40th year as an architect, it's a good bet Coe has a little more than $300.