Spero Daltas
How I came to find Spero was not in his life plan but through a web of connections, I ended up working for Brown Daltas SpA on Via Gregoriana, Rome, Italy for 4 and ½ years from 1977 to 1981. I was travel coordinator for the firm, secretary to Ben Brown and assistant to Spero Daltas. Basically I worked for everyone.
We had a lively group. We were very international: American, English, Swiss, Greek, Italian and Polish. We were gender blind: the addition of Mara Ogulis, our first woman architect, seemed quite routine despite the fact that all of the 5th floor in Via Gregoriana consisted of men. Ditto the ground floor. The administration of the office was top heavy in women: myself, Marianne Sortino, Annarita and Effie manned the reception and Raineri’s wife worked the other side of Via Gregoriana with Raineri, Ivo and Ellio.
We lived on a knife edge. Spero was brilliant and eccentric. He ran the place with an iron hand. He left notes on your desk if you were not there by 8:30AM. I used to switch on Jon Moss’s lights so it looked like he was already there. We behaved like a bunch of errant children but we were all in our twenties and thirties and young and full of life. Brown Daltas encouraged that enthusiasm and spirit.
Many children were born to the Brown Daltas family during this period. Spero used to say it was something in the water on the 5th floor. The Sandell’s Morgan, the Ostberg’s Tate and the Margolis girls, Marianne and Vasili’s Ellie and our Tobias and I am sure there others and thirty years have just blurred my memory.
Our project at the time was the King Khalid Military City in Saudi Arabia. Peter Sugar was project manager of the inner centrum of this octagonal shaped military city meant to house 65,000 troops. We worked night and day on this project and many, many architects passed through our doors either to experience working for Spero or to move on to other projects. The City was followed by six banks for the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency and a run at the competition for the new parliament buildings in Canberra, Australia.
In 1976 Fortune magazine named Brown Daltas as the leading architectural firm in the world with the largest assignment in joint venture with the US Army Corps of Engineers. Our city’s model was “stolen” by the Israelis, lost supposedly in the belly of a TWA flight to Jeddah. After three or four days and plenty of photos taken, it reappeared and continued on its journey to Jeddah.
We used to sunbathe on the roof of No. 12 Via Gregoriana. Jim Sandell would note that “surfsup” and Ron Margolis would fear the 1 o’clock cloud that inevitably arrived. One afternoon I fell asleep on the roof and no one woke me. I woke up at 4PM to find an unusual halo around the sun, similar to the one that happened in Moscow a few weeks ago.
Spero surrounded himself with other architects and employees at lunch. In those days he smoked so there were only two restaurants that would let him smoke: Arturo’s on Via delle Croce and Peppone on Via Capo Le Case. At 12 noon the cannon on the Gianiculum Hill would go off. All the pigeons would fly around in a panic and I would dial his extension. Spero would announce the number of his guests in Italian, Spanish or Greek depending on his mood. If it was raining it would be Peppone and if it was sunny Arturo’s. He would tell me frequently that the only thing urgent in this office was his lunch.
He was a champion golfer in his youth and we always fell over laughing because his golf bag which he trucked everywhere on his travels were almost as tall as he. His most unusual physical note point was his hair. He had grown it quite long and wrapped it over his bald pate. It was henna’d reddish brown but he often had inch long white roots.
His mother while she was alive would send the most fabulous baklava I have ever eaten in my life to our office for the employees. I once made him a New York cheese cake. He was a colorful, talented character who influenced many of our lives. May he rest in peace. He did stuff. He changed things. He did make a difference.