George A. Greene, 94, a mechanical engineer who pioneered the design of cleanrooms for biotechnology and semiconductor facilities and launched a consulting firm later sold to the senior engineer and project manager of Ireland, died Jan. 4 in Los Osos, Calif., his family confirmed to ENR on March 14.
Lockheed Aircraft hired Greene to design the high-bay cleanroom at its new campus in Sunnyvale, California in 1957, a month after the former Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite, with the facility becoming se in the main assembly area for the company’s satellites, both military and civilian, during the Cold War, according to an obituary provided by a family.
Greene’s work “became known to engineers and scientists developing a new set of electronic components of increasingly sophisticated design,” the obituary says, and he was hired to design clean rooms for Fairchild Semiconductor and other manufacturers that ‘ were launching at the time, including National Semiconductor, Intel and Hewlett-Packard. He designed “hundreds of projects for Hewlett-Packard, including new campuses in the western United States,” the account says, “and some of the first semiconductor facilities in Europe.”
Greene also branched out into the burgeoning biotechnology sector in Silicon Valley in the 1960s and 1970s, designing early clean and aseptic facilities for pioneering companies such as Genentech, Chiron and Gilead.
In the mid-1980s, Greene designed what the obituary calls “one of his signature projects,” IBM’s cutting-edge Almaden Research Center in San Jose, one of 12 global research facilities at the ge technological IBM referred to it as “the birthplace of the world’s first hard disk drive, relational database, nanotechnology, DVD, Blu-ray encryption technology, brain-inspired supercomputing chips, first mining algorithms data and the world’s smallest disk drive.”
Greene “used a creative design of a full-width, full-height corridor between the back rows of labs to maximize functionality while allowing flexibility to adapt to the ever-changing needs of IBM scientists with minimal disruption to ongoing research projects,” the obituary reads.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Santa Clara University, Greene worked for General Electric as a fighter engine test engineer during the Korean War, and also taught engineering at California Polytechnic University- San Luis Obispo. He founded the consulting firm George A. Greene Co. in 1953, running it until 1986, when his son Christopher Greene became president and CEO.
The company was acquired in 2010 by Dublin-based PM Group as part of its entry into the North American market. Christopher Greene served as president and CEO of PM Greene Engineers until 2013. PM Group is ranked #115 of ENR’s last 225 global design firms, with global revenue of $353.6 in 2022.
“My father was truly brilliant at his job. It is hard to describe why someone is so respected in a field that is abstract and conceptual but relentless in its details, such as engineering the mechanical utilities of a large campus of ‘high tech,’” Christopher Greene told ENR. “He had the ability to look at a complex problem and see a simple, elegant solution that others didn’t see that improved performance and reduced the cost of the entire project.”
Greene added: “He took special care to design systems that would perform well over time and be easy to maintain, and saw mechanical systems not primarily to look good on opening day and to perform well under original specifications, but had a high utility. life” that suited “the ever-changing needs of high-tech companies with minimal disruption.”
Greene says her father’s accolades “may be surprisingly modest given his achievements and his reputation, but … not only did he not seek titles and awards, he actively avoided them. This was true even as he advanced the interests of our company for it to be recognized.”
