“Gentlemen, let me tell you something. You’re babies. In architecture you are babies, it’s infantile that you should have licences. You will never be a great architect until minimum you have your 50th birthday.”

It was during his first professional job that Steven Miller was given this advice by then mentor Edward Durell Stone; senior designer of the Rockefeller Centre  Music Hall, National Geographic Society Building, the Kennedy Centre in Washington D.C. and the US Embassy in New Delhi India – considered one of the finest embassies in the world.

At 26 years old, Miller was one of six principal young designers at Stone’s townhouse studio in New York, facing the same professional uncertainties and struggles as his counterparts.

Now MENA regional manager for global architectural powerhouse Perkins Eastman, Miller may have an esteemed career of his own under his belt, but still reflects on his time with Stone, commenting: “It’s very interesting because everything happened after I was 50 years old.”

The year of his 50th birthday, Miller moved to what was then Czechoslovakia to be a developer and architect in his own firm. Staying 12 years in the Czech capital he worked on historical renovation and European hotel projects, including the continent’s first Park Hyatt in Milan, the planning for the Mandarin Oriental and Augustine hotels in Prague and the Four Seasons hotel in Florence. Recalling how the experience changed his life, he says his career from then “just always went up”.

Educated at New York’s Columbia University and the University of Colorado, the list of architects Miller counts among his mentors, tutors and friends, reads like an architecture hall of fame.

He has completed projects in the UAE, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Indonesia, Morocco, China, Hong Kong, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Ukraine, United Kingdom, Italy, and US. During his eight years in the Middle East alone he has worked with and for Emaar, FX Fowle, KPF and Perkins Eastman.

Yet his professional drive isn’t rooted by the fame his pedigree brings but the achievements he has made in his field.

“Less than 2.5% of all American architects ever get a Fellowship. So that means, considering the percentage of architects in the world, less than 3.5% of all the architects in the world get a Fellowship,” he explains.

Fellowship aside, Miller’s top three career highlights – as ranked by himself – include: The Urban Land Institute’s ‘Best International Project’ award in 1999, after which he was quoted in The Prague Post as saying “The world has fantastic taste”. The following year the same project – an historical renovation of the Vinohradsky Pavilon mall – won a MIPIM award and a second MIPIM was presented to Miller the year after.

A past President of the AIA Continental Europe Chapter, today Miller’s expertise is lent to the AIA Middle East Chapter, of which he is founder and director, as well as the College of Fellows, to which he is the international Fellows’ Representative.

“So the Fellowship very importantly, the 12 years I spent in Prague being a developer/architect gave me this master builder kind of feeling, which I really liked. Winning those very coveted awards I feel at MIPIM was important to me, the ULI was even more important,” he elaborates.

“The next thing was probably coming here and being able to move in a period of eight years with four different companies,” he continues.

Dubai

Although proud of his achievements, it seems Stone’s lessons in humility still resonate with Miller. At 71, the globally recognised and award winning architect, urban planner and business man has no intention of indulging in retirement, instead splitting his time between Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan, for Perkins Eastman.

Originally brought to the UAE to work for Emaar, Miller spent the next eight years moving through architecture’s highest realms. From managing director of FX Fowle’s Dubai branch office; to MENA regional manager at Perkins Eastman; via a 10 month stint as consultant for KPF, a New York and London-based firm in need of his expertise; and a short trip to design a hotel in Zanzibar, for his own planning and design consultancy company.

“Because I really came here to start working for Emaar, and in each case moved to a better and better, and I think even better job, for my expertise, never missing a beat; which says to me that I have succeeded in my career, because that’s through the downturn. I never missed a beat through the whole thing,” he recalls.

Now technically based in Dubai, Miller says it’s a place that has fulfilled the objective of becoming a “proper city”

“It’s a city of 2.1 million people that does what is has to do and the reason it prevails over every other city in the region is because Sheikh Mohammed had the infrastructure almost done before everything else.

“The only cities that can succeed are those where the infrastructure is ahead of the developers,” he asserts.

After his home city of New York, followed by London and Hong Kong, Miller now even ranks Dubai as his fourth favourite globally; a remarkable complement for such a discerning architect and urban planner.

Today, Miller’s professional eye is closely watching the other Middle Eastern cities looking to emulate Dubai’s success.

“The region cannot have another Dubai. They think people will want to go to Doha, Riyadh and other cities when there is all this here? It’s just never going to happen. Some of the richest people in the world are in these cities and they still come to Dubai. So Doha has all these high rises now that are mostly vacant, and after building all the high rises they’re going to drill underneath and put in metros and so on.

“They’re drilling for the second avenue subway underneath New York City right now. This is a city that has lived with subways since the beginning time and people are leaving because they just can’t stand the noise any more during the day.

Turning his attention to the world’s next skyscraping record breaker – Jeddah’s Kingdom Tower – Miller points out of his office window facing Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and continues to say: “ They’re going to top that? Who’s going to go inside it? I hope it works as I hope to be part of the teams designing the buildings in the master plan around it.”

“But Dubai is the financial centre between Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and London. It’s Dubai. Dubai is New York City, Abu Dhabi is Washington D.C. and Doha is – well, we’ll see.”

The architect’s entrepreneur

During his time in Prague, Miller took on a hybrid role that blended both the developer, architect and business man; an approach that changed the path of a career, which until that point had been, purely focussed on architecture.

“I worked for some really great architects when I was younger,” he reflects.

“After Stone I worked for the great Bauhaus fellow in America, Marcel Breuer, then I opened a firm with an older guy who needed a young designer and I became a small partner. And the intriguing thing was that he needed me to be a ‘renaissance’ architect and somebody who can touch all the pieces of architecture.

“Then I got into the business of architecture and I guess it’s proved itself over the years.”

Saying that currently “around 20%” of his time is billable, Miller’s responsibilities for Perkins Eastman cover new business, problem solving for ongoing clients, pre-architectural services, PPP modelling and client matchmaking, while also “playing professor” as needed on hotel and urban planning projects.

With a portfolio of medical projects on Perkins Eastman’s table, more senior medical project specialists are due to be brought to the Dubai office after Ramadan to cope with the growing workload.

“The hospital work I do but it’s not my thing. I’m a luxury hotel designer and I like luxury apartments,” Miller admits.

He counts private beach houses, world renowned hotels and more than 20 historic renovations. But it isn’t the projects that define Miller, it is his all encompassing and encyclopaedic industry knowledge.

Spotting business opportunity in social trends, economics and even urban failure, Miller’s anecdotes cover legal wrangles, international postings and incidents that can only be described as “academic disagreements”.

Concentrating today on personal design projects while he balances the life of a jet-setting business man it may feel logical to ask if he will ever slow down. Don’t.

Explaining how Louis Kahn died sitting up in a railway station en route to a meeting, Miller says: “Brad Perkins is around my age, I believe there about three architects in the firm who are in their 70s. You go to a convention and I’m meeting with Daniel Libeskind who is my age and Gene Kohn and Michael Graves, and everybody works. Architects don’t really retire.”

Recalling how his mother still practices interior design – and drives – at 94 years old, Miller says: “When you’re an architect you’re used to solving problems, you’re used to being with people. It’s the kind of profession that allows that. I don’t even know what I would do otherwise.”