Tina Larsen, who is a principal at Corgan—a leading architectural and design firm—joined Jim Kelley on a Champions DFW Commercial Realty Radio Show and Podcast. This is an excerpt of Jim and Tina’s conversation. Following this excerpt, enjoy a free podcast download of their entire conversation.
Jim Kelley: Tina, let’s talk about Corgan. Give us the history and the background of Corgan. Some folks may not be aware of who Corgan is.
Tina Larsen: Okay, great. And hopefully some of the listeners have seen the little yellow box that is around town quite a bit and that represents Corgan. We’re a firm that is almost 78 years old. We were founded back in 1938, and our founder, Jack Corgan, after he served in World War I, actually came back and opened his practice. And he did movie theaters, he did a lot of drive-in movie theaters.
He had a pilot’s license, so he flew from place to place to go to all these projects and got to know people in aviation and therefore sort of started expanding the aviation portion of our work. And through the years, we’ve grown quite a bit and have expanded into different market sectors as well. We currently have a staff of over 500 people. We’re headquartered here in Dallas, but we also have offices in Houston, Phoenix, LA, San Francisco, New York, and Beijing, and Dubai. So we’re spread across the country, across the world, to some degree.
We’ve done a number of notable projects here in the DFW area. Some of the headquarters that we’ve done, State Farm, which is a new development over the past few years, Christus Health, the new Toyota, which is an amazing facility, and that has been exciting. Fossil, Kubota, some of these other headquarters that are moving to Dallas, as you had mentioned. And it is, it’s an amazing amount of growth. We’ve also done a number of infrastructure projects, such as the new Parkland Hospital. That’s two million square foot hospital. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more in the future but that was an amazing project. We’ve got DFW Terminal D. I’m sure that most of the listeners have experienced that. And another airport is we actually did the original Love Field, and then we had the opportunity to come back and do the new Love Field, so that’s been a lot of fun as well.
One and Two Arts Plaza. Those were the first actually high-rise towers that occurred in downtown since the 80s, so that was exciting to be a part of that. And then we’ve done things like the Social Security Administration Data Center. So we’ve worked on a number of data centers, many of which we can’t even talk about because they’re secret projects. But that really drives all that technology across the country, so we’re really proud of that as well.
Jim: What is it that you, Corgan, does differently from maybe other firms that practice in your sector? I’d like to highlight that.
Tina: W we really focus on the experience and our mission statement is pretty simple; “We create places where our clients thrive.” And that’s very different in the different market sectors in terms of, an example, in data centers. We want to hide those buildings and we don’t want people to come there but we still have to take care of the inhabitants, so we still have to create an environment that’s comfortable and functional and works for them.
But the built environment can have such an impact on people, on well-being, on stress and anxiety, and so what we really focus on is creating environments that are functional but they’re also comfortable. And we take advantage of things like natural light and volumes and those kinds of things. And there’s actually a tremendous amount of research now that just proves what we’ve been talking about for a long time in terms of best practices, but there’s studies that show that inpatient rooms that have a lot of natural light and have views to landscaping and those kinds of things, they actually ask for less pain medications, they actually get out of the hospital sooner. And that’s big.
Listen to Jim and Tina’s complete conversation in the podcast below or get a free download on iTunes.
Learn more about Jim Kelley, here.
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