Kevin Smith
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A native of Henderson, Kentucky, Kevin Smith joined Pankow in 1978 after graduating from Purdue University with a B.S. degree in civil engineering. He worked on three projects as a field engineer and two as a project engineer before he was promoted to project superintendent, in 1985. Since then, he has remained at the superintendent level, reflecting his preference for directing work in the field.
Smith first worked on a project on the University of Southern California campus that involved adding three stories to a parking structure that Pankow had erected two years earlier. He developed additional experience as a field engineer on Fairmount Terrace II, a 6-story, 100-unit senior citizens apartment building in Los Angeles. His last assignment as a field engineer was the Pacific First Federal Center, a 14-story office building in Portland, Oregon designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and constructed for Winmar, the real estate development subsidiary of SAFECO Insurance.
Promoted to project engineer, Smith returned to southern California to build Crocker Plaza, a 12-story office tower, in Long Beach. The company then sent him to Milwaukee, Wisconsin on another Winmar project, the 30-story 411 East Wisconsin office tower, which the Pankow team erected through the frigid winter of 1983-1984.
Promoted to superintendent, Smith stayed in Milwaukee to oversee the conversion of the closed Gimbels department store at the Capitol Court shopping center into a Target store.
In 1985 Smith supervised the tenant build-out of 2101 Webster Street, a 20-story office building in Oakland, California.
Smith spent the next decade in southern California, where he supervised the construction of two parking structures at the Brea Mall in Orange County; a 21-story luxury condominium in West Los Angeles; a 3,000-stall parking structure at the Glendale Galleria; and precast concrete operations associated with Gateway Center. The latter project, built at Union Station in Los Angeles for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, was the company's largest project.
For ten months, Smith commuted to northern California to supervise construction of Pacific Plaza in Daly City. The project included a 10-story office building that utilized the precast hybrid moment-resistant frame, an innovative structural technology designed to make buildings more "earthquake proof."
Since then, Smith has worked exclusively in southern California. He supervised construction of the residential units built over Pasadena's Paseo Colorado retail and entertainment complex, completed in 2001. He then oversaw the construction of a medical office building for White Memorial Medical Center, in Los Angeles, and The Montage, a five-star luxury hotel that opened in Beverly Hills in November 2008.
