ENR California is pleased to announce that Patrick MacLeamy, former CEO and chairman of architecture firm HOK and chairman emeritus of buildingSMART International, is the 2024 Legacy Award recipient for Northern California.

This awards program recognizes industry veterans with many years of experience and long lists of contributions to their profession and community. More than a dozen individuals were submitted as nominees for Northern and Southern California. In choosing this year’s winner, ENR editors weighed several criteria, including each nominee’s history of innovation, career highlights and engagement within the industry and the surrounding community.

MacLeamy began at HOK in 1967 in the firm’s St. Louis office. Three years later he relocated to San Francisco to help establish the firm’s first regional office. Over the next four decades he rose in HOK ranks being named CEO in 2003 and chairman in 2012. He retired from the firm in 2017.

Over the course of his career, MacLeamy has helped establish standards of quality, reliability and efficiency in the building and infrastructure industries. As part of that effort, while at HOK he transformed delivery of design work from 2D CAD to Building Information Modeling using advanced collaboration tools.

MacLeamy advocates changing the fragmented nature of the industry into an integrated, highly collaborative system that emulates manufacturing. To enable that effort, in 1994 he founded buildingSMART International which aims to improve the exchange of information between software applications used in the construction industry.

In 2020, MacLeamy authored Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm: The People, Stories and Strategies Behind HOK, which integrates ideas for improving performance at design firms. Today he co-hosts the podcast Build Smart with Mark R. LePage, which is inspired by the ideas from the book.

He is a fellow with the National Academy of Construction and the American Institute of Architects. He is a past chairman of the Construction Industry Roundtable and a recipient of the National Institute for Building Sciences President’s Award.

To read more about MacLeamy and his achievements, check out the March 11 print issue of ENR California.

Here is the list of the prior ENR California Legacy Award for Northern California.