Episode 84 Mike McSwain - ”Shreveport-Bossier: My City, My Community, My Home”

Shreveport-Bossier: My City, My Community, My Home

Architect Mike McSwain sits down with Jeffrey Goodman, Director of Marketing and Development for the YMCA of Northwest Louisiana, to answer the following questions:

0:26 1. Mike, you are one of our community’s most beloved architects, having designed countless projects including the Sci-Port Discovery Center, Bossier Parish Community College, the Cyber Innovation Center and renovations to the Shreveport Regional Airport and Municipal Auditorium, to name but a very few.

Let’s start here today.

One of your projects was the creation of the East Bank District in Bossier. Talk to me about the genesis of this project, if you could, and lessons we can learn from its success that might reinvigorate and revitalize other areas of our community.

7:15 2. I have known you for a long time but until I started preparing for today’s discussion I had never heard the story about how you first decided to become an architect. Would you mind sharing some of that? I think you were in Texas Tech in Lubbock and I’ll let you take it from there.

8:35 3. Your wonderful sense of design is not only on display for us to appreciate all over Shreveport-Bossier but you have been the architect on projects all over the world, including designing condominiums in Indonesia and a luxury estate community in China.

You have done a significant amount of travel over the last 15-20 years. When you meet people during your travels and they ask you what it’s like in Shreveport-Bossier, what do you tell them?

10:06 4. Are there particular cities around the country that provide examples to you of what Shreveport-Bossier should aspire to in the future? If so, can you talk about a few of the cities and the characteristics of them you feel we should strive to emulate?

12:46 5. Compared to some other cities around the country, Shreveport-Bossier could be called conservative in its thinking or openness to new ideas or perspectives. Yet, you have seemed to always transcend that, delivering some of the most progressively designed projects our area has seen these last 30 or so years.

What advice or words of wisdom can you offer to our younger creative class – architects or any kind of creative - to make them feel like it is possible to find support for personal and perhaps progressive expression in the Shreveport-Bossier community?

16:08 6. As you look around at our community, what do you think is holding us back?

21:49 7. Lastly, what gives you hope that we might be headed in a good direction as a community?