While working on Sacramento International Airport ' s Terminal B, Dallasbased Corgan opted to collaborate with Lionakis and Dreyfuss + Blackford, both local operations, on certain design elements and technical issues. photo: matthew corley / shutterstock. com
feet of library, theater and art gallery space, with a planned opening by 2021.
Pursuing projects of this magnitude is competitive, but securing these kinds of plum assignments in Sacramento has been considerably more difficult for local firms.
For example, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, which opened on the university campus in November 2016, was designed by New York-based architect SO-IL and San Francisco firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. The pair worked with the Sacramento office of contractor Whiting-Turner. Commissioned through an international design-build competition, the parameters of the project— that architects must team with a California contractor with museum experience— significantly narrowed the scope of qualified teams. In all, 19 teams submitted prequalification packages, with three finalists selected to submit proposals. After a comprehensive public process, the unanimous winner was named in 2013.
“ Museum work is pretty specific, and we wanted someone who was going to be right for Davis and right for the project,” says Julie Nola, interim director for major capital
“ The building of the urban city is underway. And we really need local talent to develop that and make Sacramento its own place.”
— Ron Vrilakas, founding principal, Vrilakas Groen Architects
projects at UC Davis.“ And this was a donor project, so it was pretty high profile.” Several regional architects came to the prequalification meeting, and two, HGA and LPAS, submitted proposals. Sacramento-based HGA was one of the seven firms short-listed to be interviewed, but did not move on to the proposal stage.
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