People/Firms: Thought Leaders

David Adjaye on 'Assembling a new landscape of experiences' - 6/1/2008
David Adjaye, Hon. AIA, OBE, principal director of London's Adjaye/Associates, recently gave the Hem C. Gupta Lecture at the Chicago Architecture Foundation to an enthusiastic audience of 400 mostly young professionals. Excerpts follow.

Barry LePatner: 'Construction is a very dysfunctional industry' - 4/1/2008
Barry B. LePatner,Esq., Hon. AIA, is founder of LePatner & Associates LLP, a New York City law firm that represents owners, institutions, developers, and architects. Clients include Barnard College, Gehry Partners, Goldman Sachs, Millennium Partners, Starwood Lodging and Resorts, and WNET. He is the co-author of Structural and Foundation Failures (1982) and author of Broken Buildings, Buste...

Glenn R. Bell, CEO of Simpson Gumpertz & Heger: 'Owners are concerned about costs and scheduling' - 12/1/2007
Glenn R. Bell joined Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, a national consulting engineering firm based in Waltham, Mass., in 1974 and has been CEO since 1995. He served on the SGH team that investigated the progressive collapse of the World Trade Center for NIST, worked with Stephen Holl on MIT's Simmons Hall, and helped establish the ASCE's Technical Council on Forensic Engineering.

Sadhu Johnston: 'We're going to reduce our emissions 80% by 2050' - 10/1/2007
Sadhu Johnston was recently appointed Chief Environmental Officer of the City of Chicago by Mayor Richard M. Daley. Previously, he had served for two years as Commissioner of the City Department of Environment and for a year and a half before that as Assistant to the Mayor for Green Initiatives. Prior to working for the City of Chicago, Johnston was executive director of the Cleveland Green Bui...

F. Leigh Branham: 'Retaining good employees takes commitment' - 12/1/2006
F. Leigh Branham, SPHR (Senior Professional in Human Resources), is founder and principal of Keeping the People, Inc., an HR consulting firm that specializes in employee retention. In cooperation with the Saratoga Institute, he wrote The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: How to Recognize the Subtle Signs and Act Before It's Too Late (AMACOM Books, 2005), describing the root causes of employee t...

'Access to views is essential for human beings' - 11/1/2006
Lisa Heschong is a principal with Heschong Mahone Group, a Fair Oaks, Calif., consulting firm specializing in building energy efficiency policy. As a researcher, she led the teams that analyzed the impacts of daylighting on human performance for the renowned “Daylighting and Productivity Studies.

Carole C. Wedge: 'Be sure you're adding value' - 9/1/2006
Carole C. Wedge, AIA, LEED AP, is president of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, a 200-person firm based in Boston (#32 among BD+C's Giants 300 design firms). She earned a BS in environmental design from the University of Colorado and a BArch from Boston Architectural College. After a stint on Wall Street, she joined SBRA in 1986, was named a principal in 2000, and served on the board of ...

Harvard's Leith Sharp: 'You can green your campus' - 8/1/2006
In 1998, Leith Sharp was named Young Australian of the Year, New South Wales Environment Category, for her work in establishing the Environmental Management Program at the University of New South Wales. Two years later, she established the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, which encompasses 600 buildings and 21 million gsf of floor space.

Bill Gilbane: ‘Our strategy is to be very selective’ - 7/18/2006 2:52:00 PM
William J. Gilbane, Jr., is president and COO of Gilbane, a 133-year-old, 1,800-employee contractor and construction manager headquartered in Providence, R.I. The firm, ranked eighth among construction firms and seventh among CMs in BD&C’s 2006 Giants 300 with $3.48 billion in revenues, also performs program management, transition planning, and catastrophic events assessment for property insurers. Gilbane holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University.

Jeff Elie: 'Corporate real estate is transforming' - 3/1/2006
Jeffrey L. Elie is VP of Global Real Estate and Facilities for Kaplan Inc., an education division of the Washington Post Co. Previously, he was real estate director for the McGraw-Hill Companies and assistant vice president for Citibank, N.A. Next month, he will complete his term as chair of CoreNet Global, whose 7,500 members manage $1.