Case Studies Region: Midwest

Nobody is sure exactly when Lawndale Christian Health Center’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Wayne Detmer and Windy City Harvest’s Program Director Angela Mason met, but one thing is for sure: their collaboration bore fruit and is helping to feed the City of Chicago. Lawndale’s Facilities and Construction Director Joseph Lesch says their chance introduction occurred […]

In its heyday, it lured shoppers from all around Frankfort, Kentucky, offering everything they needed for their homes, wardrobes and leisure time. But heydays come and go, and the bustling Kmart fell closed in January 2018. A little over a year later, it was demolished, but the site did not remain a vacant field harkening […]

If business opportunities were drying up during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jason Kraus never got the memo. He was too busy coordinating the delivery of more than 200 projects for the national retailer, Kohl’s. Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, the company just completed its sixth and largest state-of-the-art fulfillment center in […]

Hard to believe, but 13,000 years ago, Ohio’s landscape was dotted with mastodons, giant sloths and prehistoric lions moseying around what is now the shores of Lake Erie. Toledo residents can now glimpse into that rare window of the world through Toledo Zoo’s ProMedica Museum of Natural History, says Jennifer Van Horn, the Toledo Zoo’s […]

On one hand, 2020 was about keeping up with day-to-day developments; on the other, planning for an uncertain future. Director of Facilities Josh Schaffer and his crew at the City of St. Charles School District in Missouri started planning for the worst—then hustled to make the best out of a tough situation. “About the time […]

There’s something about the soil in Wisconsin that can be most unsettling—literally—to a house’s foundation. Most of the state is covered by the Ice Age’s glacial deposits and expansive clays much affected by the extreme seasons of the Upper Midwest.  During dry spells—and this region has known drought—the soil shrinks, which can cause what’s been built atop to settle unevenly and oftentimes crack. But with climate change, summer temperatures could be rising and that might mean increased rainfall and […]

It may not be a traditional banking space, but Josh Meyer of Bremer Bank says the tried-and-true approach needs to give way to something better. The new Bremer location accomplishes just that, opening in the Holiday Center in Duluth, Minnesota, in July 2020. Instead of the typical customer service windows, enclosed offices with paneled doors […]

When we last spoke with Jon Fahning and Minnesota-based Bremer Bank in July 2019, the 77-year-old financial institution was working to launch new branches in locations throughout the upper Midwest. As with any construction project, having the right architectural plans was critical. But there was another document that proved equally indispensable: Bremer’s 100-plus-pages design playbook […]

The rest of us can say hello to Jonathan Overacker, the director of facilities and engineering for Riverside Healthcare in Kankakee, Illinois. Not only was Overacker born at Riverside Medical Center, so were two of his four children, and his father worked there for 40 years. But there’s little time for nostalgia these days, not […]

His company noted for powering infrastructure at Chicago’s two international airports, John Hartmann recently turned down a request to send a crew well outside the Windy City. Thanks, but no thanks, the 33-year-old vice president of third-generation Hartmann Electric Co. Inc. politely told a would-be customer who sought expertise on a baggage handling project at […]