Adam Rolston, 62: Finding Beauty in Age, Change, & Failure

As head of a highly successful global architecture firm, Adam could simply glide forward on the momentum he has created. He, however, has wisely recognized that today’s challenge lies in playing it safe, looking out for the difficulties before imagining the possibilities. The experience of starting and running a business can condition someone to always be looking for the dangers. This is where having the multi-generational team at his firm, INC Architecture & Design, comes in. Younger people, through calibrated mentoring, can bring in ideas that we older people may have discounted as impossible.

Walking into Adam’s expansive offices was a revelation in how the senses can be activated by design. My first impression was that I had walked onto a movie set, as the textures, the lighting, and the colors were so carefully curated. Though it’s clearly functional, with the rows of desktop screens, these seem to be more so props within a wrapping vision of a design first and modern sensibility.

Confession: I want a house, and I want Adam to design it. His gorgeous Ridley Scott-esque cinematic vision, the mix of a wabi-sabi imperfectionism with humanized modernity, and his idealizer’s sense of space and light, all combined with a through line of optimism, has me feeling a lust for a proper home.

How old are you?
Sixty-two. I literally turned 62 yesterday.

What are your thoughts around age?
I could talk about it personally and also professionally. I love the idea that people our age are doing things for the first time, right? Just in general—that we’re still doing firsts and that maybe it wasn’t something that our parents thought about. Ambition doesn’t end at 55; there’s still a desire to explore new things, do new things, that kind of thing.

I wrote my first book, which was published last week. We had a book signing. It’s about architecture, design, our world. It’s a first at 62. I actually would like to write a book about intergenerational collaboration.

I have a ton of experience, as much experience as one could get in a professional way. That is, in some ways, liberating because I know what’s going to work so I can get to things faster. And I am maybe excited by a little less and see more of the problems, right? Whereas, young people don’t have any of the baggage of experience, so they see things very differently and can see blue sky where I’m not going to see it. And when those two things come together: magic. That’s it. Magic.

People talk a lot about the advantages of age—which are that we have a bigger, hard drive.
Yeah, nice phrase. That’s good. I’m going to use that.

How do you deal with failure?
It’s all about mindset. And optimism. You just get back up. You just get back on. And, you know, I think I know at this point that with every one of those failures, there’s also an underlying loss on the brain from it that made me better. You only learn that by having it come back later, like, Oh, that was from that experience. That’s why I react that way. And that’s a good thing. That’s experience.

What do you see as some of the liabilities in your creative process, as far as age?
What I focus on is the enthusiasm deficit that can set in because you see the problems. I’m lucky because, on some level, I feel like I’m 18 years old on the inside. People will say something is shitty, but I’m enthusiastic about everything. I want to do everything. I want to see everything. 

But I do see in myself moments where I am seeing the difficulties and not seeing the possibilities. I have to kind of fight that sometimes. It’s partially true—our hard drives are bigger. We’ve seen more. We’ve seen more problems. But also, I think there’s a kind of conditioning there, too. There’s something cultivated in there about the way that we see the world as we get older. I’ll give you a dumb example. I have kind of an exuberant relation to my own sartorial clothing. Just this morning, I asked my partner: Is this age-appropriate? That’s a kind of self-attack that happens within the creative process. It’s that kind of self-editing that I think is a little bit of a liability. 

I think with the self-editing, if you take it to its end point, you get to fossilization. Which I see all the time. Good friends of mine, they’re very successful artists. It becomes a brand. It’s like repeat, repeat, repeat. That would seem to be sort of fear-driven versus what you’re saying with young people. They don’t have that. So ,how do we change that mindset, that fear mindset that closes things down? How do we return to an optimistic possibility mindset?
It’s hard for me to formulate a theory right here, right now, but I have a trick that I play with myself. I’ll often get into a mode where I have to do this, I have to do that. This can only be this way. This kind of self-editing thing. And I’ll just stop and say, I’m 62 years old. What do I want to do here? What’s going to get me excited? I’m not going to do this unless that’s there. I will step away from this project and let the junior people do it. Unless I can say, What it is that I want to do for myself? And then, all of a sudden, I get excited. And that joy—the joy comes in again.

Yeah, never say no to joy. Circling back to the intergenerational interest, Thomas Friedman says, “A robust ecosystem is a very diverse ecosystem.” This is why I personally like having much younger people around me. They’re just different. It’s interesting that you articulated designing as a group. How does that look? If the 25 to 26 year olds come in and say, “Big Boss Adam, I think it should be blue.” How do you approach that?
I will say it’s not easy. It’s an effort to get the group dynamic working. Because I’m the oldest and the most comfortable with myself, I can dominate the conversation. A lot of it is about me trying to step back and listen. And teaching the other senior people to do the same.

But it goes the other way around where the young people have to find their voice at the table. And I see them struggle. And the ones that can check their ego and listen to what’s really going on, and then contribute within that flow, are the ones that succeed. You see it, you see them. Something hits and starts going around the table, and you can see the thrill for them. And that’s the lesson. They learn, Oh, that’s what you want from me. That’s how I can contribute. 

What I hear is a mixture of mentoring and actual peer-to-peer collaboration.
And opening up the space for that. It’s different for different people how they open up to that space.

What’s hard for you now?
I am in a project right now for myself personally, and it has to do with both personal and the studio. You start to build a reputation. We’re at the peak of that now, and then it’s going to be about how that continues into the future in terms of expanding and producing better work, more complex work, more interesting work, different work. That is a goal of mine in this next chapter for us as a studio—and leveraging the reputation that we’ve built.

But then, also, you have to plan for the future, right? During COVID, I worked on a succession plan and how I would transfer my ownership to the next generation—literally, at the practical level, but also at the leadership level. We took on two new junior partners. There’s a kind of evolution of life, things that happen both personally, but also the studio is growing older. And right now, among the five partners, there’s some tensions that are there, that are about, like, how do the younger people take on more responsibilities?

Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they have a hard time taking on too much more than they can handle. How do you mentor that? How do you begin to let go but then continue to influence in a way that’s meaningful? I thought a lot about that over the last couple of years and have thought a lot about how I’m going to begin to influence and work in the studio differently in this next chapter than I did in the previous.

What is that going to look like?
The book is one thing. I’m really trying to lead at a broader level versus literally teaching at the level of when we’re working on a drawing or editing and drawing or giving critique to a design as a group. I only have so much bandwidth for teaching every individual over and over again.

I have to pass that on to the next generation. That means what I’m teaching is slightly different, and, in my mind, it should be slightly higher level, a little broader, a little outward speaking to the public and inward speaking at a broad level. So it’s like a broader definition of leadership, which feels more appropriate at this stage for me.

Being 62, this is a respectful age. How do you feel your internal dynamic, your internal world, has evolved and where do you see that going?
These are deep questions. The clarity of starting a business and growing it gets under your skin; it gets into your DNA; you are altered and learning to let that go. We’re established. We have runway. Learning to let that go and finding the space to open up again in a funny way, to return to that childlike self, is important. I could not have written the book if I hadn’t given myself the space to do that. And ten years ago, I wouldn’t have had the space, the mental space.

What’s exciting about the future is that you open up again. Like Susan Sontag said, you return to a childlike state of freedom when you’re older. Because you’ve gotten the foundation. Now, it’s flight time again, in a funny way.

If there was one struggle, it’s learning to give myself that freedom—that I’m not in a precarious mode anymore. I’m not the struggling young man, and I have the freedom to do what I want to do. I need to give myself permission to do that for that guy.

How does that intersect with risk?
Complicated, I would say. It gives you room to take more risk 100%. No question. I’ll do things now that I wouldn’t have done ten years ago. On the other hand, I have noticed that my relation to risk has changed a great deal. I’ll give you an example. I just got back from Zion. There are a lot of big hikes, and if you do any of the big ones now, they’re pretty crowded. There was this one young guy that was ahead of us, and he scampered up this pinnacle and stood on top, and I just thought, Yes, they’ve got nothing to lose. They have no sense of what they could lose. And so they can take that kind of risk.

For me, it’s a much more calculated risk now. I know I must know where I can step out on the edge safely. 

What are we wearing today? There’s sort of an architect’s uniform that they tend to wear, but what you’re wearing is not it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I’ve always had an interest. My brother was in the fashion world and he’s been an influence. I often talk about clothing and self-expression. And one of the problems with junk space is that there isn’t the kind of cultural self-expression, that’s not happening. It’s just another language telling people who I am.

What do you get from nature?
As I mentioned, I just got back from Zion, and I did have a little bit of a revelation. I’ll have to say it’s going to get very complicated, but we went to one of the slot canyons, and I put my hand on the wall and I leaned on it. And when I touched the wall, it was a little bit, not damp, but cool. And I was a little bit hot and something happened. I felt like the revelation for me was that I was touching the entire planet. That’s what being in nature is about, kind of understanding your place in the world in a funny way. And beauty.

And what’s the value of beauty?
You’re talking to a beauty junkie. Beauty is the thing that takes us to a higher place beyond all that kind of mean, difficult, hard scrabble-struggle of being human. It’s the one place where we step above. I mean, when I said this to my mom and sister-in-law, she said, “Well, that’s how I feel about God.” 

What kind of music do you listen to?
I am obsessed with this one artist called Omah Lay. It’s Afro dancehall music, but it’s got a kind of R&B influence. It’s very mellow. 

What’s the hardest thing you ever did in your life?
Leaving home. At 14 I left. I would say that was the hardest thing. But also failing. Failing at things. I think the other thing is losing people. There were three things. 

Talk to me about the three things that are your nonnegotiables in life.
Beauty. The physical—and to me the physical incorporates exercise and things like food. And creativity. 

Connect with Adam:
INC NYC
Adam’s LinkedIn

Photos of Adam by David Harry Stewart.