M|O Perspectives
Check back here for our thoughts on the latest developments in our industry.
5 Challenges to Building Owners and Investors
May 08, 2023
The news cycle today is filled with financial concerns such as inflation, rising interest rates, layoffs, and banking issues. Despite the headlines, the construction industry is continuing to add new jobs, and contractor backlogs remain strong. That said, the building sector is not without its...
Learning from the February 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquakes
Apr 17, 2023
On February 6, 2023, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake occurred in southern Turkey near its border with Syria, followed about nine hours later by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake approximately 60 miles to the north of the first one. The impacts of these earthquakes were devastating. The number of fatalities in...
Navigating Nuances of Student Housing Construction at Community Colleges
Feb 24, 2023
Many economically distressed students as well as educators looking for teaching jobs feel higher education is entirely out of reach in communities where the cost of housing has skyrocketed and is in limited supply. As more students look to community colleges for a more affordable and flexible early...
Design-Build Delivery: What Owners Need to Know
Jan 12, 2023
In part one and part two of our design-build series, we explored the history of design-build and its evolution to progressive/collaborative design-build. Now we’ll discuss what owners need to consider when implementing either type of design-build. While we’ve noted that modern design-build has...
New ASTM Guide for Property Resilience Assessments Well Underway
Dec 15, 2022
There are over 12,000 ASTM guidelines that apply to everything from steel to sustainability. With the climate crisis at unprecedented levels, there is greater regulatory pressure to document and disclose climate risk, and the time is now to develop an industry-wide ASTM guide for property resilience...
Collaborative Design-Build in Multifamily Construction
Oct 31, 2022
Design-build (DB) was initially adopted by healthcare organizations to streamline design and construction, and its subsequent success led to its adoption by governmental/public agencies, higher education, and the K-12 education sector. In the multifamily industry, DB is relatively unknown, but...
Inside the Evolution of Design-Build
Sep 29, 2022
Construction isn’t known for being an efficient process. Why? Because building a structure is subject to so many vagaries: weather, labor, logistics, market forces, pandemics, material availability, and a host of other factors that can impact any construction site. It’s no surprise, then, that we're...
Hitting a Home Run on Stadium and Ballpark Projects
Aug 11, 2022
Marx|Okubo has the privilege of working on so many challenging and exciting projects. With dedicated, integrated architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) teams at our local offices around the country, we have the opportunity to help protect and preserve stadiums. These beloved cultural...
Museums: The art of specialty asset analysis
Jun 15, 2022
Museums fall into one of Marx|Okubo’s specialty asset types: Arts, Culture & Entertainment. Inevitably, these classic monuments come with their own set of challenges. But it’s the creative problem-solving required by such challenges that we look forward to most in our reviews of museum...
Healthy balcony. Happy balcony.
May 12, 2022
Updated from original publishing on September 17, 2018 Shortly after midnight on June 16, 2015 in Berkeley, California, three men and three women were killed when the balcony they were standing on collapsed. Seven others were injured and, ultimately, a multimillion-dollar lawsuit ensued and was...