James Allen (Jim) House, 87, former president of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America, died on September 18 a Carmel, Indiana. The cause was mesothelioma.
After a career as a plumber in Local 440, House founded JA House, Inc. in Indianapolis in 1973, providing HVAC, plumbing, sheet metal, controls, electrical, fire protection and excavation services on large projects in Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky until 1996.
He served as president of the National Mechanical Contractors Association in 1990 and served on the National Plumbers and Pipefitters Pension Board.
“Jim was one of the early leaders of MEP prefab,” says Daniel Peyton, principal of Charrette, a real estate construction management consultancy. “His company worked on the construction of multiple high-rise buildings in the mid-1980s in Indianapolis, where they used large, prefab, glued/anti-skid plumbing and HVAC assemblies that were built off-site and then lift on a rig of tower crane platforms that was JA House’s 110,000 GSF facility was custom-built for its time, as it included areas dedicated to the prefabrication of large-diameter carbon steel, so such as the prefabrication of food and pharmaceutical grade stainless steel.
