https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XCeS1uopV8&t=46s

We recently sat down with Pete Zyskowski from THW. Pete is the Director of Design Technology, and describes himself as a “story teller and dot-connector”. THW is based in Atlanta with ~90 staff. The summarized answers to my interview questions are shown below, but you can watch our full discussion in the video above. We always enjoy chatting with Pete, and this time was no different!

Tell us about your company (short) & why was Arcol of interest to THW company in the first place?

We are a multidisciplinary design firm, and we tend to do a lot of campus and concept planning work with our clients. We have been looking for a way to speed up the process while also being able to better analysis, and more options.

What size/type of project do you typically do feasibility studies for?

All sizes, typically multifamily and Senior living. Many of our projects can be a multi-phase, multi-year project with a mixture of new construction and renovation/additions. We also provide data and concepts for multi-year capital planning for a lot of our clients. This requires campus-wide analysis, sometimes across their entire portfolio.

THW Design’s Taikang Lu Garden in Xiamen, China

What did your feasibility study workflow look like before Arcol?

It's a lot of manual labor. Our land planning team, designers, and principals work hand in hand with our clients. We have a strong consultative discovery process. After that, it's a lot of sketching and some work in Sketchup, Revit, and Excel to provide unit counts, square footages, and other data.

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Manual labor? We’ve never heard of architects having to do tedious manual labor! (insert sarcasm here)

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What sorts of problems were you looking for new tools to solve?