Every month we’ll be touching base with past 40 Under 40 honorees to see what’s been happening in their professional and personal lives since winning the award. (U40 alums are invited to participate by sending an update to: jhigginbotham@sgcmail.com.) This month: Standout architects in Chicago and Los Angeles make their mark with massive, complex projects.
DAVID MONTALBA, AIA, SIA, LEED AP
Founding Principal
Montalba Architects, Los Angeles
Class of 2012
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Montalba continues to serve as acting Design Principal on all projects for his firm, which handles retail, restaurant, residential, hospitality, office, institutional, and educational work. The practice has clients in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East as well as the U.S., and has grown to 30 full-time employees since it was incorporated in 2004. Recent projects include numerous luxury retail stores (Stylehaus, Isabel Marant, Barbara Bui, Ports 1960), representing an expansion of the sector for the firm; Nobu Malibu, a Japanese restaurant; concessions design for the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX (in collaboration with LAWA and Westfield); and Duty Free Shops in the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
Teaches “Introduction to Construction” for the Graduate Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, his alma mater.
Recent awards: AIA Los Angeles Presidential Honor Award, Building Team of the Year, 2013 (for the LAX International Terminal collaboration); Los Angeles Business Journal 2014 Commercial Real Estate Award (hospitality category, for Nikita restaurant).
EXTRACURRICULAR
Actively involved in supporting the A + D Museum in Los Angeles. Firm collaborated with the museum in the recent ARkidECTURE children’s workshop.
Jury Chair, AIA Institute Honors for Interior Architecture 2014.
OFF THE CLOCK
Montalba enjoys playing tennis and hanging out with his kids in Santa Monica, where he resides. Takes frequent trips to visit his family in Lausanne, Switzerland.
MATT DUMICH, AIA
Senior Architect / Project Manager
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill
Architecture, Chicago
Class of 2009
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Dumich recently joined Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, a firm dedicated to the design of high-performance, energy-efficient, and sustainable architecture on a global scale. He is currently a Project Manager for EXPO-2017, an international exposition in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the theme “Future Energy.” This large project includes exhibition and cultural pavilions and a new residential community with office, retail, hotel, educational, and civic facilities, as well as parks. The design is performance-driven, with each building oriented and shaped to harness energy from sun and wind to create a highly sustainable development.
Recent honors: 2012 AIA Chicago Dubin Family Young Architect Award, 2013 AIA National Young Architects Award.
EXTRACURRICULAR
Selected to join the AIA Chicago Executive Committee as Secretary for the Board of Directors in 2012. Working to support the chapter as Chicago hosts the AIA National Convention this June.
Co-founder of Bridge, a mentoring and leadership program that pairs young architects with members of the AIA College of Fellows.
Keynote speaker, 2011 Chicago Architecture and Design College Day. Has presented talks on architecture to student groups at the Illinois Institute of Technology, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Judson University, and the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
OFF THE CLOCK
A self-proclaimed foodie and beer snob, Dumich constantly seeks out new restaurants. A recent vacation took him and his wife to Tokyo and Kyoto, where they photographed the unique textures of Japan.
Related Stories
| Oct 13, 2010
County building aims for the sun, shade
The 187,032-sf East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., will be oriented to take advantage of daylighting, with exterior sunshades preventing unwanted heat gain and glare. The building is targeting LEED Silver. Strong horizontal massing helps both buildings better match their low-rise and residential neighbors.
| Oct 12, 2010
Holton Career and Resource Center, Durham, N.C.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. Early in the current decade, violence within the community of Northeast Central Durham, N.C., escalated to the point where school safety officers at Holton Junior High School feared for their own safety. The school eventually closed and the property sat vacant for five years.
| Oct 12, 2010
Guardian Building, Detroit, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. The relocation and consolidation of hundreds of employees from seven departments of Wayne County, Mich., into the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit is a refreshing tale of smart government planning and clever financial management that will benefit taxpayers in the economically distressed region for years to come.
| Oct 12, 2010
Richmond CenterStage, Richmond, Va.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Bronze Award. The Richmond CenterStage opened in 1928 in the Virginia capital as a grand movie palace named Loew’s Theatre. It was reinvented in 1983 as a performing arts center known as Carpenter Theatre and hobbled along until 2004, when the crumbling venue was mercifully shuttered.
| Oct 12, 2010
University of Toledo, Memorial Field House
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Memorial Field House, once the lovely Collegiate Gothic (ca. 1933) centerpiece (along with neighboring University Hall) of the University of Toledo campus, took its share of abuse after a new athletic arena made it redundant, in 1976. The ultimate insult occurred when the ROTC used it as a paintball venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Owen Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Officials at Michigan State University’s East Lansing Campus were concerned that Owen Hall, a mid-20th-century residence facility, was no longer attracting much interest from its target audience, graduate and international students.
| Oct 12, 2010
Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Gartner Auditorium was originally designed by Marcel Breuer and completed, in 1971, as part of his Education Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Despite that lofty provenance, the Gartner was never a perfect music venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cell and Genome Sciences Building, Farmington, Conn.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Administrators at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington didn’t think much of the 1970s building they planned to turn into the school’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. It’s not that the former toxicology research facility was in such terrible shape, but the 117,800-sf structure had almost no windows and its interior was dark and chopped up.
| Oct 12, 2010
The Watch Factory, Waltham, Mass.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards — Gold Award. When the Boston Watch Company opened its factory in 1854 on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Mass., the area was far enough away from the dust, dirt, and grime of Boston to safely assemble delicate watch parts.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Cleveland, Ohio
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Gold Award. The Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was dedicated on the Fourth of July, 1894, to honor the memory of the more than 9,000 Cuyahoga County veterans of the Civil War.
