Small Business Profile: Design Remedies

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Design Remedies

Architectural firm builds a reputation as it supports health

care facilities faced with seismic upgrades, planning tasks

By LAURENCE DARMIENTO

Staff Reporter





As hospitals across the state try to meet strict seismic retrofitting requirements, planning and architecture firm Lee, Burkhart, Liu Inc. finds itself with a lucrative niche.

The Santa Monica firm has built a reputation for its work on health-care facilities, and with hospitals facing the earthquake requirements, there’s still a lot of work to do. LBL performed compliance plans for every one of Tenet Healthcare Corp.’s 45 hospitals in California, and is now performing architectural design work on three of them.

The 16-year-old firm has put its stamp on a string of large health-care projects in Los Angeles and across the state, including the $818 million replacement of Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center. Besides Tenet, it counts Kaiser Permanente among its clients.

“They are especially good up front, creating concepts that work,” said Bill Loorz, a former Tenet vice president for construction and design. “They will go through a dozen different schemes and plan to help us choose the best plan.”

Large local projects

The firm’s most celebrated recent success is the Marion and John E. Anderson Building for Childrens Hospital. The 105,000-square-foot building includes a surgery center and recovery rooms, and it has drawn praise for its playful public areas that Disney Imagineering helped design.

But it’s the seismic retrofitting mandates that are sure to give the firm a higher profile. “No one anticipated the Northridge Earthquake and all the legislation that came down from it,” says principal Kenneth Liu, who specializes in seismic work.

Liu, and his partners Kenneth Lee and Erich Burkhart, first worked in the Los Angeles design firm of Bobrow/Thomas & Associates, which also specialized in health care. Each of them had made partner by the mid-1980s, but decided they wanted to strike out on their own.

They found themselves working on the kitchen table of Liu’s West Los Angeles house. Even so, the young firm won a commission for a $30 million women’s services center at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. “It was us versus a very established firm,” recalls Lee. “They really liked us. So they took a flier on us.”

Both Lee and Burkhart have masters in health planning and public health. Lee, who is not a licensed architect, says much of what the firm does involves developing detailed master plans that lay out the current needs and future challenges for health-care providers.

“Architecture is much more that just designing the image of a building, or picking out materials or exterior design characteristics,” he said. “A lot of our hospital clients think an architectural solution will fix their problems, but a lot of times they have not defined their problems.”

On the wall of their offices is an example: a nine-volume, two-foot-long tome that lays out the medical center master plan for the University of California at Irvine’s replacement hospital.

50 design jobs

The firm has done about 500 master plans for clients, which have led to over 50 major architectural assignments enough work for it to turn away clients. It has a staff of 70 and $15 million in annual billings.

Besides seismic work, the firm also has won commissions in a line of related work academic and research facilities. That includes research buildings at UCLA and USC. In addition, it completed the master plan for the California State University campus in the Coachella Valley, as well as architectural work for 100,000 square feet of buildings there.

Perhaps the firm’s biggest break came when it was chosen to be one of the designers of a new County-USC medical center after the original building was damaged in the Northridge Earthquake.

The partners hadn’t even planned on bidding for the project until a lunch with a friend at the Los Angeles office of Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum Inc. (HOK), now the world’s second-largest architectural firm.

That firm was interested in bidding on the huge project, but did not have a local healthcare practice at the time, so the decision was made for a joint bid. The team was chosen for the $40 million design contract, which will continue until the mammoth project is completed in 2007.

“This is a great building for the county,” said Alicia Wachtel, an HOK architect and the project’s manager. “It provides a new approach to health care delivery. It’s more open and welcoming.”

The firm has not had an unbroken string of success. It developed the master plan for UCLA’s massive new hospital, only to lose out on the architectural commission to a team led by architect I.M. Pei.

Dr. Michael Karpf, director of the medical center, said LBL was at a disadvantage it could not overcome, given that the university wanted to make a grand architectural statement with a renowned architect.


PROFILE:


Lee, Burkhart, Liu Inc.

Year Founded: 1986

Core Business: Planning, architectural and interior design services for the health care industry.

Revenues 1999: $13.4 million

Revenues 2001: $15.3 million

Employees 1999: 64

Employees 2001: 68

Goal: To increase billings at least 10 percent annually.

Driving Force: Bringing value to clients through design creativity and innovative planning.

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