NBBJ, making an impact regionally and globally

by Lucy Bodilly

NBBJ has already made an impact on the Northwest region and throughout the United States.

Now it is focusing even more heavily on Asia.

Architects influence the built environment, but few can claim to change the environment on a global scale.

Headquartered in Seattle with offices in Los Angeles; London; New York; Columbus, Ohio; Beijing; Shanghai and Dubai, the architects at NBBJ are indeed making a global statement.

The evidence is clear inside the Seattle office, where employees are talking to clients in Russian, English, Korean, Japanese and Mandarin.

"We have a very cosmopolitan firm," said Jay Halleran, managing partner.

Other local firms also work around the world. Collins Woerman, MulvannyG2 and Callison in Seattle and ZGF and SERA in Portland focus on work abroad.

Because of its worldwide reach, and its top ranking in our 2006 Top Design firms survey, NBBJ was chosen as the company to feature as a Firm of the Year. With worldwide billings of $142 million, ($82 million of that in the Northwest), the company ranked as the largest architectural firm in the region.

The firm started out changing one Seattle neighborhood - Pioneer Square. It designed the Kingdome. Though it was fraught with construction problems because of the difficulty of building a concrete dome, "it was one of the buildings in the downtown Pioneer Square district that we designed that did change the city," Halleran said.

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NBBJ later designed Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners. It also has worked at Swedish Hospital in Seattle for more than 60 years and designed the Starbucks Headquarters building and most of the projects at the Microsoft campus in Redmond.

The Boeing Co. also has given NBBJ a lot of work. Architects most recently reconfigured one of the hangars at the Everett, Wash., plant so engineers designing the planes can look down on the production floor, and machinists and engineers can eat in the same lunchrooms and trade observations about the assembly process.

"It's all about LEAN production methods at Boeing," Halleran said.

LEAN production is an assembly-line manufacturing methodology developed originally for Toyota and the manufacture of automobiles. The goal of LEAN production is to work in the most effective method possible, with no wasted time, money or materials.

NBBJ is introducing LEAN into the production cycle it uses to design and build projects.

It recently signed a single contract with Summit Hospital in Oakland and the general contractor to design and build a $320 million hospital using building image modeling. The goal is to have no requests for information on the project.

Typically a project of this size would have about 5,000 RFI's, Halleran said. Getting rid of RFIs is easier with building image modeling, where the project team completely reviews all project documents in a three-dimensional model before construction starts.

"If you stop doing RFIs, you can cut about 20 percent out of the cost of a construction project," Halleran said. He added that he expects to sign a similar contract with Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle.

In some ways NBBJ is following the lead of its clients because major hospitals in the Seattle area started to use LEAN production methods to provide health care.

Health Care Projects a Priority

One of the new challenges for NBBJ is to redesign older hospitals that have gone through multiple renovations and seem like a warren of disjointed hallways.

"We want to bring all the parts together again so the hospital is more user friendly, comforting and nurturing," said Richard Dallam, partner in charge of health-care projects.

Dallam started his education as a premed student and eventually graduated with a master's degree in philosophy. He holds a degree in architecture and now specializes in health-care projects.

"Architecture is like the philosophy of the built environment," Dallam said. "The premed helps me relate to people in hospitals.

Geographic expansion

The company continues to expand geographically with offices in Shanghai and Beijing.

NBBJ's current signature project is the Sail at Marina Bay, now under construction in Singapore. The high-end residential project includes two towers - one over 70 stories high, the other 50.

The two towers are curvaceous, like sails on a ship, said Jim Waymire, principal of the firm's practice in Asia. "This will be the premier address in the city," he added.

The building is virtually floor-to-ceiling glass to take advantage of the views. The contractor on the building is from France.

Meanwhile, the paint is still wet on Asia World Expo, an exhibition center big enough to park seven Boeing 747 aircraft. Located next to the Hong Kong Airport, the facility is designed to allow people to showcase their goods.

Waymire has been flying around the globe on for NBBJ for the past 16 years. "The first reason for success is having an understanding spouse," he said. "Then you have to know you have something to offer, while at the same time have a tremendous amount to learn."

China is the firm's largest single market in Asia. It has a representative marketing office in Beijing, and the firm's new office in Shanghai has design capabilities.

"This is a global economy, and people tend to underestimate to what extent," Waymier said.