Case Studies November 2021

When Patrick Bonds walks through the halls of South Carolina’s Lexington Medical Center Extended Care, he often asks himself, “Is this a place where I would want one of my family members to live?” With the facility’s clean, homelike environment and holiday celebrations, he says his answer is always “yes.” As LMCEC’s director of facility […]

Patrick Sise is used to building in the clouds. Most of his time at Wood Partners LLC, where he’s vice president of construction, has been spent building high rises in Chicago. The past couple of years, though, he’s started working on smaller, multi-family buildings. The projects aren’t only different because of their size. The materials […]

There’s something about that “new car smell” which reminds Patricia Scott of the fun she had during her summer job in high school, where she washed cars at H&R Pontiac Buick, a car dealership run by her neighbors in Alberta, Canada. Back then, she often wore coveralls to work. Her colleagues called her “Sam,” since […]

In 2013, when students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said they needed better recreation centers and a plan to improve the overall health and wellbeing of campus, administrators knew they were right. The two centers on campus were decades old and hadn’t been upgraded in years. In addition to being small and not having expected […]

Big things were afoot when Ken Cooper joined Larimer County, Colorado, government in 2016 as its director of facilities. As part of a facilities master plan he helped develop, the county was considering widespread improvements and expansion for county operations, most immediately to criminal justice and public health buildings. Yet there was always the chance […]

Up until the day Mark Lockard closed out his career in school facilities and construction management, he was still learning. That’s because there’s a lot to know, he says. In a school design and construction career spanning more than 20 years, he’s seen changes and advancements in technology used to save—and even produce and recoup—energy […]

It used to be that if you were getting physical therapy for your hip through Hackensack Meridian Palisades Medical Center, you had to fight cross-town traffic, travelling to one of its three locations in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. That logistical nightmare is now a thing of the past, says Director of Facilities Mark […]

For Pio D’Andrea, there’s always been something magical about trains—from playing with them as a child in Montreal to feeling the g-forces in his chest the first time he rode a high-speed bullet train in Japan. It’s a passion that put him on track to work for railways around the world. After four years abroad, […]

Though her stamp was already on much of modern Manhattan, Rey Black still wanted to do more when she brought her architectural skillset to The Howard Hughes Corporation in 2018. “I had built so much, but never a pier,” she tells Blueprint in August. “We were pulling out old piles and driving in new ones […]

While Chris Freund’s title at Rockwood School District may be director of facilities now, it’s not the one he started with. He was previously the district’s grounds services coordinator. Before that, grounds services supervisor, and before that, grounds services employee. Prior to holding any of those titles, though, he held one much more common in […]