Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. Robert Scott Sisson, director of Facilities, grounds and landscape operations for Florida State University. I believe it's been almost 20 years since I've been here at FSU. TK Weatherall was the president. He wanted a place where people could go, they could sit, they could enjoy themselves. It has to be safe, it has to be clean. It has to give you a first impression, make you want to say, I'm going to leave so and so and come work here. Because I can go out and have a cup of coffee and just enjoy the landscape. I think the very first thing I did, and it's not just me, it's the facilities team. It's just not me. We took off all the guard rails. We took off all the chains. We took off all the links. We started looking at ways to look at the sidewalks to create bigger sidewalks, bigger walkways, but saving the oak trees. And one challenge led to another challenge, and we just kept on going. The important part of is there should be some type of kind of an adventure, something that leads you off to the path, say it's different plants or different microclimates or different things to discover, and it leads you to a different design. It's almost, is if it's a puzzle. You know, one of the things I like, kind of proud of a little bit, when we were building a Mary Coburn building, it used to be a parking lot. And so there was all these oak trees in the parking lot. So what we did is convince everybody that if we just moved them, just a little bit, we could get them out of the footprint of the building. And that made all the difference. Because the architect was able to fit the building right into those oak trees. Robert Scott Sisson, director of facilities, grounds, and landscape operations for Florida State University. You're listening to voices that inspire.