Case Studies Design-Build

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 […]

As a general contractor in the Phoenix area, Steve Anderson tired of the bidding game around 20 years ago and identified an underserved niche that he would fill; that is, the building and remodeling of dental offices. “I saw how necessary it was to help dentists get their clinics off the ground,” he says. “There […]

After stumbling across an article about modular homes, third-generation homebuilder, Anthony Zarrilli, recalls showing it to his father. The elder Zarrilli scoffed, labeling modular houses cheap and flimsy. Zarrilli grew up learning the finer points of traditional building from his dad and remembers scouring the job site for loose nails as a five year-old. However, […]

“The first good part about my story is that my father taught me how to work from a young age,” says Brandon Jett, owner of Jett Builders, a custom-home building and remodeling company in Tallahassee, Florida. When Jett was a kid, his father bought a piece of property outside of Tallahassee with two large tobacco […]

“People are our biggest asset.” As the founder and managing partner of OPX PLLC, a design consultancy in Washington D.C., Steve Polo has heard his clients say that sentence countless times. “If that’s true,” Polo says, “then as a company you need to make sure you show it.” Ten years ago, while designing and renovating […]

With flood events on the rise in America, the federal government has overhauled once-stagnant regulations and insurance requirements, leaving general contractors, engineers and architects scrambling to understand this new age of flood protection. “They call us up panic-stricken saying they tried to get a certificate of occupancy, but were just told by an inspector that […]

The developer of Spaulding Green, a 400-acre housing community in Clarence, New York, realized target buyers preferred homes built into hillsides with walk-out basements. The land being developed was essentially flat, though. To make the walk-out basements possible, Greenman-Pedersen Inc. (GPI) got creative and turned flat land into varied terrain with ponds, hills and elevated […]

Wells Bullard loves to see something most people would never think twice about: construction crews wearing their hard hats while they eat lunch. For Wells, vice president of personal protective equipment manufacturer Bullard, that’s proof that the company’s hard hats aren’t uncomfortable. As Wells says, “personal protective equipment is only effective when it’s worn, and […]