Happy New Year from Bialosky + Partners! We’d like to start off 2014 by announcing a series of promotions this week! To kick things off BPA recently promoted both John Guzik LEED AP, RA, and Director of Sustainability and Ryan Parsons, LEED AP BD+C, RA to Senior Associate.

John Guzik was welcomed to our Cleveland office in 2006 as a designer who clearly had a passion for sustainable practices. With a B. Arch. from Kent State University's CAED (c/o 1995), John’s experience in sustainable architecture ranged from Metropark projects and greenhouses to large-scale historic preservation/ renovation.  Having had all of this experience before he joined BPA as well being a LEED accredited professional since 2008, John now leads many of our sustainable initiatives with the title of Director of Sustainability. A well-fitting title for John, seeing as he led several of our projects to earn LEED certification, including Fuchs Mizrachi Day School (LEED Silver), and the award-winning Lorain County Community College’s Culinary and Convergent Digital Arts (LEED Silver candidate).

Sustainability is not just about building "green" environments. It’s about protecting what is already green. John carries that philosophy as a 10+ year volunteer for the Ohio Canal Corridor- the organization behind RiverSweep which is Ohio’s largest done-in-a-day cleanup effort. At RiverSweep 2013, John helped in the effort to remove over 60 tons of trash from sites across the industrial valley (such as The Flats, Canal Basin, and Tremont). John is also a proud supporter of the Cleveland FoodBank and a caring father involved in his local chapter of the parent-teacher association. For those young designers looking to succeed in the field, John recommends putting down the ARE study guides for a moment and picking up Dr. Seuss’ Oh, The Places You’ll Go. It is believed John can recite this piece of landmark literature as well as he can recite the current Ohio Building Code Book. John prides himself focusing on how the smallest of details in a project are always connected back to the big picture agenda of a given project.

In addition to all this, John, who became licensed in 2003, is also the continuing education co-ordinator of "BPA University" (our in-house lunch seminar series which takes place about once a week). While BPA University often consists of the typical product rep presented lunch and learn, we have expanded the program to include presentations from non-profit and professional advocacy organizations as well as presentations from BPA employees on a large variety of topics. This approach has helped to make sure that Bialosky + Partners is a laboratory for continued learning, above and beyond the standard continuing education requirements all architects are required to fulfill. After making sure we get our learn on at lunch, John would love to take the office on a trip to the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, located on Wade Oval in University Circle and designed by the Gund Partnership. As John says, "Wouldn’t we all (at) this time of year benefit from being surrounded by warmth, humidity, and green growing things? It is also a handy symbolic representation of how human-built structures can support the natural world and how reliant we humans are on the both the built and natural environments."

Ryan Parsons joined Bialosky + Partners in June 2005 as a project architect, bringing to the firm 10 years of experience working as a design professional. A classmate of Mr. Guzik, he is a graduate of Kent State University’s CAED with a B. Arch. (c/o 1995). He currently is the project manager for the renovation of the historic Schofield Building at the corner of East 9th Street and Euclid Avenue in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. The project, a collaboration with CRM, Inc. and Sandvick Architects, consists of renovating the 14-story 1924 building to accommodate a boutique hotel, apartments, retail shops and a restaurant.

In addition to the Schofield Building, Ryan has been project manager for the Hattie Larlham Center For Excellence, a project that included renovating the existing facility, constructing three separate additions totaling 25,000 sf and adding significant parking and an emergency heliport. New and renovation work was geared toward a population that is increasingly dependent on medical technology. Ryan also served as project manager on two Cuyahoga County Community Hospitality management projects – the new East Campus Hospitality Management Center and the downtown campus Hospitality Management Center, a hybrid project that is also home to the excellent Pura Vida in an adaptive re-use of the historic May Company Department Store, adjacent to Public Square in downtown Cleveland. Additionally, Ryan also worked on Bialosky + Partners collaborations with Kallman McKinnell and Wood Architects on renovations to The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.  He has also worked closely with architects from RTKL on the new headquarters for American Greetings to be located in the Bialosky + Partners master planned Crocker Park development in Westlake, OH.

The Ohio State University's recently Mason Hall home to the Fisher College of Business. The project has a collaboration between Kallman McKinnell and Wood with Bialosky + Partners as Architect of Record. Ryan was the project manager for this comprehensive project.Ryan takes pride in frequenting and supporting the local arts, business and restaurant communities by shopping locally at independent businesses, and is passionately involved in supporting his children’s school and extracurricular activates. While the cello, saxophone, and gymnastics are not part of Ryan’s skill set and he leaves his wife to troop lead the Girl Scouts, he can be found pacing a basketball sideline like Bobby Knight and in the summer in a baseball dugout doing this best to put Terry Francona to shame as a coach for his kid's sports teams. Working and managing highly complex projects, often working with multiple stakeholders, clients, and other architecture practices, has taught Ryan the value of listening and the need for a high attention to detail. In turn, if there is one book he would want to read, it would be Design Drawing by William Kirby Lockard, an essential treatise in clarifying the role of drawing in the design process, differentiating design drawing from drawing for art and technical drafting. After brushing up on our reading, Ryan, who is quite fond of live theatre, would like us all to head downtown to Cleveland’s Playhouse Square theatre district to see one of their many spectacular performances in any of the fabulously renovated theatres and take in the ongoing public space and streetscape improvements  happening right outside of the theatres.