Case Studies April 2017

Institutional clients like schools and healthcare providers are increasingly willing to invest long term, both with the incorporation of renewable energy and sustainable design. That makes them ideal clients for architecture firms like NK Architects. NK Architects is a full-service architecture, interior design, planning and structural engineering firm based in Morristown, New Jersey. It works […]

Few companies embrace the “work hard, play hard” mentality quite like The Exterior Company. Most of the year, The Exterior Company’s staff of 40 office personnel and 50 to 60 laborers, is spread around the East Coast, helping individuals and companies repair roofs, siding, windows and gutters after destructive storms. It’s hard work, and it […]

Far removed from the beaches and theme parks that define other locales, north Florida has its own amenities that attract some of the 1,000 folks who move to the Sunshine State daily. “It’s a beautiful place to live and raise your family,” says Lynne Edwards, executive officer of the Tallahassee Builders Association (TBA) and owner […]

John Harlan, president of The Harlan Company, wasn’t planning on making a green building—or rather, the greenest building. But in 2015, he and others at the company learned about a private school in Missouri that needed a remotely located classroom built to the highest environmental standards set by the Living Building Challenge (LBC). The company […]

Before 2007, most general contractors self-performed at least a few different trades. This involved hiring a larger staff of skilled workers and giving them work through busy and lean periods. But after the financial crisis in 2008 killed projects and forced thousands of workers out of the industry, many contractors started subbing out almost all […]

Not many people would use the word contemporary to describe the Rust Belt. Once the industrial heartland of the United States, the region, which sprawls from upstate New York to the Great Lakes to northern West Virginia, is now associated with the decline of American manufacturing. As a Cleveland native, James “Deej” Lincoln grew up […]

Originally the nation’s first public high school for African-Americans, Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., had fallen into such disrepair that in 2011, the district opted not to renovate but to raze and rebuild. “A dark, dingy and nearly windowless high-rise,” the Washington Post deemed it. Its principal likened it to a prison. Its replacement […]

People have been building with stones, blocks and bricks since before they had language to describe what they were building. Sturdy, fireproof and low maintenance, stone buildings have carried humanity from the temples and fortresses of ancient civilizations to modern skyscrapers. As the times have changed and the materials have evolved, the need for craftsmanship […]

Gene Li knows better than to take a well-lit street for granted. In 2015, his clean energy equipment supplier and engineering consultant company, Atlantic Clean Energy Supply LLC (ACES), was approached by a small coastal city in Long Island, New York, because one of the town’s neighborhoods didn’t have access to the street light power […]

Sixty-five years ago, when Capform Inc. founder Mario Dozzo applied to emigrate from Italy, he told the Italian consulate that he wanted to get as far away as possible; they handed him tickets for Vancouver, Canada. Dozzo spent weeks traveling to Spain, crossing the Atlantic by boat and traveling through Canada by train. When he […]