Obituary: Jim House, 87, Was Mechanical Contractor Leader

Photo courtesy of Daniel Peyton

James A. "Jim" House, 87, a former union pipefitter and contractor who became president of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America, died on Sept. 18 in Carmel, Ind. The cause was mesothelioma, according to a family member.

After work as a pipefitter with Local 440 in Indianapolis, House founded J.A. House Inc. in that city in 1973, providing HVAC, plumbing, sheet metal, controls, electrical, fire protection and excavation services on major projects in Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky until 1996.

He served as president of the National Mechanical Contractors Association in 1990, and served on the Plumbers and Pipefitters National Pension Board.

"Jim was an early leader of MEP prefabrication," says Daniel Peyton, principal of Charrette, a real estate construction management consulting firm, and House's nephew. "His company worked on the construction of multiple high-rise developments throughout the mid-1980s in Indianapolis, where it used large, ganged/skidded prefabricated HVAC and plumbing assemblies that were built off-site and subsequently lifted upon tower crane platform rigging that was custom fabricated from semi-truck beds."

Peytonn added that House's 110,000 gross-sq-ft facility "was ahead of its time, as it included dedicated areas for large-diameter carbon steel prefabrication as well as food and pharmaceutical grade stainless-steel prefabrication."

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

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