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Vernon Swaback
Architect, planner, managing partner of Swaback Partners, founder/chairman of the Two Worlds Community Foundation and Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice, Swaback has long been heralded as a visionary in the areas of sustainability and design. Swaback also recently celebrated his 30th anniversary with wife, Cille, and is a father of two adult daughters.

What does “power” mean to you?
It combines having a purpose-centered idea worth living for, with an ability to build bridges from things as they are to where that idea can take root and grow.

What impact do you strive to have on the Valley?
Our time and place is far more strategically significant than what we easily recognize. To do anything less than to use this opportunity to, in effect, design the future, is to misunderstand the opportunities before us. My special focus is on designing for the creation of community.

Who is your mentor?
He has long been called ‘the world’s greatest architect’ and more recently, ‘our first ecological architect.’ He celebrated the special sense of Arizona both in his presence and in his work. His name is Frank Lloyd Wright.

Why have you chosen to make Arizona your home?
Like every other thing in my life, I never so much made a conscious decision as much as the choice seemed made for me. I came here from my native Chicago, with no other reason nor interest than to study with Frank Lloyd Wright, where I remained for 21 years. After that experience, to live anyplace else seemed unthinkable.

What are your future goals?
To design, shape and expand the reach of design until it becomes as basic to our way of life as nature is to our survival.

What superpower would you like to possess?
The power to rid humanity of our self-defeating behaviors coupled with an opportunity to turn the community of the world into our most treasured work of art.