Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood, the Montgomery, Ala.-based architecture and engineering outfit, strengthened its position in Georgia by completing its acquisition of Smyrna, Ga.-based Stevenson & Palmer Engineering, which has been in business in the Peach State for more than 50 years.
The two firms have been collaborators for at least the past two years, and currently have several projects underway. Teams from both companies have been working on an integration strategy to ensure a smooth transition.
Stevenson & Palmer’s 22 employees will continue to provide engineering support services from their company’s four Georgia offices, albeit under the name Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood, which already had an office in Atlanta. “The SPE team is still in place—we’ve just added a few names and a new list of services to our resume,” said Corkey Welch, Stevenson & Palmer’s former President, who is staying on as a Senior Client Manager for the combined firm. That team now reports to Jim Teel, Goodwyn, Mills’ Vice President of Georgia.
Founded in 1947, Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood employs more than 300 people who work out of its dozen offices in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina. The company assembled its Georgia team in 2011. Steve Cawood, President of the firm’s Eastern Region, which encompasses its operations in Georgia and South Carolina, spearheaded the negotiations between the two companies, which began two years ago, says Abby Basinger, a GMC spokesperson.
Its services include environmental, geotechnical, interior design, landscape, planning, surveying, and transportation. This month, GMC started construction on a 140,000-sf, $55 million football complex at Clemson University that is scheduled to open in early 2017. The firm is also in the planning stages of a $29 million expansion and upgrade of Franklin High School in Williamson County, Tenn., which if greenlighted would include more classrooms, a new athletic facility, and multipurpose field and track.
Basinger says GMC, which does work nationally, has no immediate plans to open new offices. But she also points out that GMC has customers in Mississippi and North Carolina, “so you never know.”
Related Stories
| Oct 13, 2010
Community college plans new campus building
Construction is moving along on Hudson County Community College’s North Hudson Campus Center in Union City, N.J. The seven-story, 92,000-sf building will be the first higher education facility in the city.
| Oct 13, 2010
Bookworms in Silver Spring getting new library
The residents of Silver Spring, Md., will soon have a new 112,000-sf library. The project is aiming for LEED Silver certification.
| Oct 13, 2010
County building aims for the sun, shade
The 187,032-sf East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., will be oriented to take advantage of daylighting, with exterior sunshades preventing unwanted heat gain and glare. The building is targeting LEED Silver. Strong horizontal massing helps both buildings better match their low-rise and residential neighbors.
| Oct 12, 2010
Holton Career and Resource Center, Durham, N.C.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. Early in the current decade, violence within the community of Northeast Central Durham, N.C., escalated to the point where school safety officers at Holton Junior High School feared for their own safety. The school eventually closed and the property sat vacant for five years.
| Oct 12, 2010
Guardian Building, Detroit, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. The relocation and consolidation of hundreds of employees from seven departments of Wayne County, Mich., into the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit is a refreshing tale of smart government planning and clever financial management that will benefit taxpayers in the economically distressed region for years to come.
| Oct 12, 2010
Richmond CenterStage, Richmond, Va.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Bronze Award. The Richmond CenterStage opened in 1928 in the Virginia capital as a grand movie palace named Loew’s Theatre. It was reinvented in 1983 as a performing arts center known as Carpenter Theatre and hobbled along until 2004, when the crumbling venue was mercifully shuttered.
| Oct 12, 2010
University of Toledo, Memorial Field House
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Memorial Field House, once the lovely Collegiate Gothic (ca. 1933) centerpiece (along with neighboring University Hall) of the University of Toledo campus, took its share of abuse after a new athletic arena made it redundant, in 1976. The ultimate insult occurred when the ROTC used it as a paintball venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Owen Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Officials at Michigan State University’s East Lansing Campus were concerned that Owen Hall, a mid-20th-century residence facility, was no longer attracting much interest from its target audience, graduate and international students.
| Oct 12, 2010
Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Gartner Auditorium was originally designed by Marcel Breuer and completed, in 1971, as part of his Education Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Despite that lofty provenance, the Gartner was never a perfect music venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cell and Genome Sciences Building, Farmington, Conn.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Administrators at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington didn’t think much of the 1970s building they planned to turn into the school’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. It’s not that the former toxicology research facility was in such terrible shape, but the 117,800-sf structure had almost no windows and its interior was dark and chopped up.
