David Boyd

An Indiana native, David Boyd graduated from Purdue University in 1960 with a B.S. degree in civil engineering.

Boyd moved to Los Angeles, where he took a job in the Arcadia-based building division of the Southwest District of Peter Kiewit Sons’, headed by Charlie Pankow.

In May 1963, while he worked as project engineer on the First & C Building in downtown San Diego, Charlie Pankow, Robert Carlsen, Lloyd Loetterle, and Ralph Tice founded Charles Pankow, Inc. (CPI). The mass exodus of men out of the building division to join CPI included Alan Murk, superintendent on the First & C project. For the moment, Boyd remained with Kiewit, giving him the opportunity to take over Murk’s role and to see the project through to completion.

Charlie Pankow eventually persuaded Boyd to join CPI, however. His first assignment was Central Tower (“Turk and Eddy”), a housing project in San Francisco.

When he completed that project, Boyd worked on several projects in San Jose, California, among them 1625 The Alameda, the First American Building, and a residence hall at San Jose City College (now University). Thereafter, he worked outside of the Bay Area: an office building in Renton, Washington, followed by a Holiday Inn in Toledo, Ohio. Married with two children, working out of town took its toll. So when Rosser Edwards, Boyd’s friend from their Purdue civil engineering days and a colleague at both Kiewit and CPI, approached him about forming a construction company with two developers, Boyd jumped at the chance.

Edwards had been working on the Borel Estate in San Mateo, where CPI completed several buildings for William Wilson III, Miller Ream, and Gilbert Bovet, partners in the Borel Development Company. As Edwards explains in his interview, he followed through with the idea of forming a company with developers Wilson and Ream when Charlie Pankow rebuffed his request to name him head of CPI’s Northern California region.

On 19 January 1971, Boyd, Edwards, Wilson, and Ream incorporated Webcor.

Like Pankow, Webcor focused on commercial construction. They delivered projects using design-build, thereby contributing to the diffusion of the methodology. Focused geographically in Northern California, Webcor became renowned for building the headquarters of some of Silicon Valley’s leading firms, among them Electronic Arts, Oracle, Siebel Systems, and Sun Microsystems.

In 1994 Webcor absorbed A. J. Ball Construction, the eponymous firm headed by Andy Ball. In 2000, both Edwards and Boyd retired, leaving Ball in charge. In 2007, in the context of a deepening recession, Ball sold a controlling interest in the company to Obayashi, a Japanese construction company.