Meet the First Female Principal

Mar 27, 2018

Sharron Scroggin, Vice President, Principal, and Landscape Architect has been at HagerSmith for over 34 years. Her passion shines through with the way she talks about HagerSmith and her work. She loves a good challenging project where the whole team gets involved to solve the challenges. That’s one thing she admires about HagerSmith is the fact that it is so collaborative, being a multi-disciplinary firm. “Architects design on a flat world, which I like to call the architectural plane. The world is not flat though, so it is nice as a landscape architect to work together on fitting buildings on to natural terrain.”

Since Sharron has been at HagerSmith for over 3 decades, she has experienced a lot over the years. Recessions, the rapid growth of downtown Raleigh, and even the challenges woman specifically have faced in the work force. “I was made a principal when women were not principals in firms unless they were married to principals. HagerSmith has always been very supportive and progressive in that area.”

HagerSmith has been in the same building for just about 40 years so they have seen the area grow. It is safe to say they helped contribute to that growth as well. “It’s cool to ride around Raleigh and see one of our buildings on either corner. I remember leaving downtown Raleigh and it was a ghost town. Now when I leave work around 7 or 8 pm, there are people waiting to take my parking spot.” It has dramatically changed and that has been really fun to watch, says Sharron. Some of their buildings are actually old enough to be knocked down which is sad to see, but it shows how long the firm has been around. Sharron jokes that in the early days, most people thought they only built brick buildings since that became one of their most popular projects back then. Now predominately brick buildings are the exception.

Sharron loves working at a multi-disciplinary firm and thinks that’s one of the reasons why HagerSmith has been so successful. Now, Sharron says, they have a “proven reputation, a great success rate with permits (which can be a big construction schedule challenge) and we do a pretty good job at managing our egos and avoiding the gotchas (favorite phrase) which also save time”

As for the next 40 years, Sharron hopes there are no more deep recessions and they are still in the same building since she loves working at their current location so much.

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