Profile: Thomas Robinson

By FRED W. WRIGHT Jr.

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 23, 2001

NEW POSITION: Projects director, Beers Construction Co., Tampa.

PREVIOUS POSITION: Associate director of facilities, University of South Florida, Tampa.

Thomas Robinson sees his new role as projects director for a leading construction company as "the third leg of the stool."

"I understand from the architectural side, I understand from the user side and now from the construction side, so I can put everything into balance," he said.

Robinson was named projects director for the Tampa office of Atlanta-based Beers Construction Co. in January. Robinson is responsible for bridging three areas: marketing, preconstruction and construction.

"I remind everyone of the owner expectation and reinforce with the owner that there is somebody they have seen from Day 1 to see that their interests have been maintained," he said.

Maintaining that three-legged balance "is half my role," he said. "The other half is we're doing more and more design-builds. We're designing to budget versus budgeting a design. I think this keeps the owner's interest at the highest level. I can explain back to the architectural side why we're doing it this way."

Design-build is an emerging concept in the construction industry. It involves "hiring a single entity to both design and build your building instead of hiring an architect and getting the design started, then hiring a construction company," Robinson said.

He said he enjoys the architectural side the most. "It's where the action is," he said. "The ability to touch projects like that, that's what's exciting."

Robinson said his rewards come from "seeing the results of what you've envisioned in your mind come up out of the ground."

Robinson spends more time working on higher-education projects than on commercial ones, he said. Beers has a number of projects involving colleges and universities, including the construction of the University of South Carolina basketball arena, a new journalism building for Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and a new butterfly museum and sculpture garden at the University of Florida.

The trend today is "value engineering," Robinson said, "getting the most for the owner and to respect the design that's on the table."

As a member of the American Institute of Architects, Robinson was associate director of projects for the University of South Florida for three years before joining Beers. Before that, he was director of facilities management for the state of Tennessee for 10 years.

"Understanding users and owners is where I have been for a long time," he said. "Before that, I had my own architectural firm for 10 years," Thomas Robinson Architects in Morristown, Tenn., which he started three years after graduating in 1975 from the University of Tennessee with a bachelor's degree in architecture.

Robinson is the first architect in Beers' Tampa office and one of just a few in the company, which has more than a dozen offices, mostly in the Southeast.

"I'm sort of a second-generation architect," Robinson said, noting that his father was an architect for a short time.

Robinson, 52, is married and has two children. He is a member of the Tampa chapter of the American Institute of Architects and is on the steering committee for the new Florida chapter of the Design Build Institute of America.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright