Big ideas have never deterred Patrick MacLeamy. Building teams brave enough to pursue them is the biggest challenge, says the former CEO of architecture and design firm HOK.
“When you can get people to treat each other like friends and family, you’ve really got something,” says the now-retired MacLeamy.
In MacLeamy’s half-century at HOK, this philosophy was quite successful. Eli Hoisington, who now shares the firm’s co-CEO role with Susan Klumpp Williams, credits MacLeamy with building the once-regional firm into a prestigious global design practice with offices and flagship projects in nearly every continents
HOK’s first regional office was opened by MacLeamy in San Francisco in 1970.
Photo courtesy of HOK
“You look at what HOK was when he took over and what he delivered, and it’s extraordinary,” Hoisington says of MacLeamy’s legacy. “To bring HOK into what it takes to be a large international company requires a thinker on Patrick’s level: to be a manager, but also to have a vision. There are only a handful of companies that have our skills, and he was the catalyst for that.”
Along the way, MacLeamy was an early advocate of new technologies and encouraged the use of collaborative tools to improve the practice of architecture. These efforts led him to form buildingSMART International (BSI) and develop interoperable digital standards at the heart of BIM and other collaborative tools widely used in design, engineering and construction.
This impressive list of accomplishments has led ENR to name MacLeamy the 2024 Legacy Award winner for Northern California.
Among the major design projects MacLeamy led at HOK was the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Photo courtesy of HOK
Project a path
MacLeamy’s career with HOK began in 1967 when he was nearing the end of his architectural studies at the University of Illinois and ventured to St. Louis for a job interview with HOK founding partner Gyo Obata.
“He electrified me with his passion for what the company could do,” says MacLeamy.
Hoping to spend only a few years at HOK, MacLeamy stayed exactly 50 years. Every time he was “sneaky,” he says, company leaders offered an intriguing opportunity, the most important of which was being selected to open HOK’s first satellite office in San Francisco.
MacLeamy’s superiors also encouraged him to apply his talent for organization by moving from design work to project management, a role that required learning a lot on the fly, including the difference between managing and leading.
“It’s much more than getting people to do things and offering advice,” he says. “Fortunately, I had a lot of good mentors at HOK and I was able to apply the things they taught me.”
“It’s the company’s job to take care of its people so those people can take care of their customer.”
—Patrick MacLeamy
MacLeamy quickly understood that building strong business relationships, both inside and outside the building, was a critical element to success.
“It’s the company’s job to take care of its people so those people can take care of their customers,” he says. “This means a steady salary, good benefits, interesting projects to work on and an opportunity to move up in the company as you grow in skills and abilities.”
Hoisington says he has taken MacLeamy’s many teachings to heart during his own leadership journey at HOK.
“As you get into leadership, you can very easily become conservative,” he says. “However, Patrick was willing to take risks, and he was usually right. One of his quotes, ‘run into trouble,’ is so simple, but it’s not something everyone does.”
The design of San Francisco’s Moscone Center was another major HOK project led by MacLeamy.
Photo courtesy of HOK
Ideas and improvements
MacLeamy willingly shared lessons learned and personal insights with colleagues and competitors alike, including the eponymous “MacLeamy Curve” that shows how front-loading resources early in the design stage avoids costly changes once construction begins.
Similarly, the impetus in the mid-1990s to lay the foundations for BSI arose out of MacLeamy’s frustration at trying to describe increasingly complex three-dimensional buildings using two-dimensional pieces of paper. Although the nascent computer-aided design (CAD) technology had made inroads into the design industry, MacLeamy wanted to take it further.
“Computers, which were getting more and more powerful, could coordinate and check things with speed and accuracy beyond what humans could do,” he says. “We needed a way to standardize these 3D drawings so they could be easily exchanged with software not only across the design team, but also by the engineer and contractor.”
MacLeamy found a kindred spirit in Ian Howell, an Australian architect who at the time was director of AEC products and industry marketing at Autodesk. In a meeting with MacLeamy in San Francisco, Howell described an Autodesk initiative to use object-oriented programming as a software design paradigm rather than the long-standing logic-based approach.
At the end of what Howell characterizes as a rather technical conversation, “Patrick said, ‘I didn’t understand half of what you said, but the other half sounds very important.'”
Howell adds that MacLeamy “saw the commercial value of this approach, particularly using open source standards that could be incorporated into other design and information management software to improve portability and reusability, regardless of the platform of the user”.
McLeamy’s enthusiasm for open standards would be instrumental in gaining buy-in from both US-based software developers and large design firms and then their foreign counterparts. While the effort entailed extensive world travel, hours of meetings and taking on the unfamiliar role of fundraiser to sustain the initiative, MacLeamy helped guide BSI from its volunteer origins to a nonprofit organization based in London dedicated to creating open standards for BIM software development. which has since been adapted for infrastructure and other systems throughout their life cycles.
Howell has no doubt that Mac-Leamy enjoyed his “day job” of leading HOK. But leading BSI, he says, “gave him the opportunity to pursue his passion for trying to improve the many flaws in our industry: fragmentation, late or over-budget projects and communication barriers.”
MacLeamy inspects a HOK job in Oslo in 2010.
Photo courtesy of HOK
Active and engaged
Although he has stepped away from business and industry leadership positions, MacLeamy, 81, is anything but a stereotypical retiree. In addition to sharing a wealth of local volunteer activities with his wife, Jeanne, an architect he met while at HOK, he continues to share his visionary thinking with the industry he loves and has helped shape. Along with podcasts and speaking engagements, he is working on a book outlining problems and solutions for the global construction and infrastructure industries.
“Architects and contractors should be sharing ideas rather than being in separate camps,” he says. Always eager to embrace innovation, he believes digital twin technology holds great promise for better informing designs and their functionality throughout an asset’s lifecycle.
Even with his experience and knowledge, MacLeamy says he’s still learning, another lifelong pursuit that began with his grandfather, a carpenter who designed houses based on experience and observation rather than in formal training.
MacLeamy believes that “Pop” would be impressed, and not quite gasped, by the accomplishments of the young grandson who regularly bugged him to take a turn drawing the house plans. One particular lesson that has stayed with MacLeamy is a corollary to the carpenter’s dictum, “measure twice, cut once.”
“Cutting incorrectly wastes time,” says MacLeamy, “and I remember Pop saying, ‘You can never get that time back.'” I carried that valuable lesson throughout my life and career as an architect, and I would love to thank you.”
