I didn’t want to stay in Indianapolis after college, and there were no jobs for me in Seymour. How do you get a small-town feel into a city? How do you create a neighborhood where everyone knows each other and takes care of each other, not to the exclusion of others, more like with open arms, like ‘This is a great place, you should come and live here’? I was interested in the psychology of it all. My college thesis was on building a neighborhood. I was never interested in designing iconic buildings. I applied to three colleges, and Ball State University offered me a tuition-free scholarship, so I went there. It wasn’t until I took a drafting class in my junior year of high school that architecture struck me as a job I might want to do. I was born in Nebraska and grew up in Seymour, Ind., an unremarkable place. When did you realize you wanted to be an architect? Joel Prendergast, at right, and his sons prepare to ride the Manta roller coaster at SeaWorld in Orlando, Fla., on a recent day. It’s about this abandon you feel, exhilaration, adrenaline, but you’re never in actual danger. There’s this feeling that you’re dropping over the edge of that lift hill and you’re plummeting toward the Earth and everything in your body tells you you should be afraid. People love to think they’re in danger while knowing they‘re always completely safe. Havlik’s story, edited and condensed from a recent interview. On the coaster, riders lie in a face-down, head-first position, mimicking the gliding movements of a manta ray.
![manta roller coaster manta roller coaster](https://a.cdn-hotels.com/gdcs/production195/d1973/7db8c0cf-e5ab-4245-9fe1-5fc47f10c0ec.jpg)
The queue doubles as an aquarium, and riders follow a twisting route through tanks filled with angelfish, tetras, seahorses, an octopus and seven varieties of rays. Havlik, an architect by training, described his job in the shadow of the Manta, a coaster he designed for SeaWorld in Orlando, Fla. Parrot Coaster, Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in Guangdong, China Kumba, Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay, Fla. Coasters designed: Manta, SeaWorld in Orlando, Fla.
![manta roller coaster manta roller coaster](https://live.staticflickr.com/3457/3269107227_4483f040c8_b.jpg)