Ep: 032 - Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm - Patrick MacLeamy

Architecture, Design & Photography

Background: Patrick MacLeamy, FAIA, worked his way up from junior designer to CEO of HOK, a global architecture, engineering, and planning firm, where he worked for 50 years. Since 1955, HOK has designed hundreds of major projects including the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in DC, Apple’s first major campus in Cupertino, the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, Orioles Baseball Park in Baltimore, the expansion of Saarinen's Dulles Airport, the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport, DFW Airport in Dallas and re-imagined Laguardia Airport. A self-taught executive, MacLeamy loved designing a firm just as much as he did designing buildings. He is best known in the design industry as the creator of the “MacLeamy Curve,” which advocates front-loading effort during the design process to catch errors early. A pioneer in leveraging technology to support design quality, he is currently chairman of buildingSMART International, where he pushes tirelessly for the global implementation of building information modeling (BIM). He is also an author. His new book - Designing a World Class Architecture Firm: The People, Stories and Strategies Behind HOK, was just released by Wiley and is now widely available.