Profile | m.thrailkill.architect

Above: Hawaii State Capital, Honolulu; architects John Carl Warnecke with Belt, Lemon & Lo

How we grow...

Striving to build skills and confidence in our intern staff and recent architecture school graduates, they're engaged through direct project and management experience. All our staff participate in the specifications process at each level of development, from proposals and contract negotiation, through specifications production and coordination, bidding phase and project administration assistance, client support and marketing.

Project visits, fabrication shop tours, conferences and trainings, and office retreats keep us connected to each other and the work we do for our clients. These activities expose us to advances in materials and products, help us retain our awareness of standards and best practices, and maintain our internal cohesion, enthusiasm and quality of work. One of the company's goals is to produce the next generation of architectural specifications writers, in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Our staff are achieving great things!

One of our specifications manager's, Yanet Orozco Gomez, co-founded the Portland professional chapter of NOMA, the National Organization of Minority Architects, in 2020.

Then those same founders, along with the vibrant and growing membership, within a couple years of starting the chapter won their bid to bring NOMA's 2023 National Conference to Portland in October 2023.

This same group has now gone on to start a new student NOMAS chapter, based at Portland State University, of which another of our staff Donaldo Zarate-Rincon is President. We're proud of their involvement!

Engaging with our clients and colleagues in architecture and the arts...

Michael, Ben and Tony attended the Monterey Design Conference in California October 25 to 27, on the grounds of Julia Morgan-designed Asolimar.
Representatives of our clients Allied Works and Lever Architecture presented their work, including many projects we specified for them.

Yanet attended and presented at the National Organization of Minority Architects' National Conference in Baltimore in October 2024. Tony and Michael presented at the NOMA National Conference in Portland in October 2023.
NOMA's events bring together architects and interns of color from across the nation, providing an opportunity to acknowledge the strong efforts being made for a more inclusive and equitable professional community.

Several of our staff have attended the Construction Specifications Institute's National Conferences in Houston in October 2024 and in Minneapolis in October 2023.
These annual opportunities to engage with the nationwide specifications writing community provides valuable awareness of changing professional trends, expanding information sources, and improving tools for specifying.

Several of our staff attended the 2024 Oregon Design Conference in Bend in May, a biennial event where the theme addressed the current housing crisis, sustainability, and resilience.
We saw many of our Pacific NW clients there and together explored ideas for how to improve conditions for more fair, equitable, resilient and sustainable housing.

In May 2024, Michael presented about specifications and DfMA with Ergodomus and other prefabrication design leaders. Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) is a methodology for identifying and quantifying materials, eliminating waste and inefficiencies, and ensuring ease of fabrication and assembly.
His presentation reviewed the tolerance requirements included in specifications for the variety of materials that constitute a building's structural system, show how differing tolerances can cause problems at intersections of assemblies, and explain how specifications can reconcile this.

Several of our staff have attended the annual International Mass Timber Conference in Portland each year in March, and we host our annual invited dinner with industry leaders. Let us know if you'll be there!

Michael traveled to Venice in November 2023 to attend the Biennale Architettura, a biannual exploration, examination and celebration of architecture that attracted over 285,000 visitors from May through November this year.
While there, Michael also met with an established mass timber structural engineer based in the Trento region, Ergodomus, planning collaborations for future presentations together.

In December 2023, Michael attended Art Basel in Miami Beach with our clients at Zyscovich, exploring the changing trends of art and design. He also visited the offices of some of our Miami-based clients, including 2+ Architects.

Getting together for tours, conferences, learning and staff celebrations...