Case Studies January 2021

Growing up in Houston, Monique Davis could see her neighborhood needed some care and wanted to help fix the buildings in the city she called home. But how, she remembers thinking, could she even get started? The answer came in a chance meeting when architect Vergel Gay spoke at her school and he and his […]

He’s adept at juggling high-stakes projects with strict timelines and sometimes dealing with inherent geological challenges in the process. Such as in 2018, when Justin Smith was overseeing the development of student housing projects in both Fort Collins, Colorado, and Honolulu. Laying down a sprawling slab foundation in northern Colorado didn’t present too many challenges, […]

Growing up in Burlington, Massachusetts, Bob Engel Jr. remembers writing in his yearbook that his career goal was to be self-employed, just like his father, Bob Sr. was. There was no other man in the world he respected more. It’s been 41 years since Engel committed to following in his father’s footsteps at the family-owned […]

It was not a fun job, but there was Kelly Fleming, a little girl cinched up in a toolbelt, picking nails out of the dirt and dust at construction sites. “I wanted to spend time with my brothers and my dad, and that’s what they made me do,” she recalls. Picking up nails was just […]

Be careful when you start working on what seems to be a small, seemingly straightforward construction project, says Jonathan Hunley. Likening that situation to finding a stray thread on a sweater, he says if you pull on, it everything can unravel. But even if that happens—as it did with his first project at Bon Secours […]