Ruilding: From Omaha to to Brazil

BUILDING

Even by going standards in executive suites, the sweeping, 56-ft-long room in Omaha is something special. It has marble floors, Hawaiian wood panels, French stained glass, Japanese carvings, Indian temple bells, a lavatory with walls of kangaroo hide and an abstract painting in the elevator. Leo Daly Jr. uses it to impress potential clients with the versatility of his firm. Leo Daly Co., the midwest’s biggest and the nations third largest firm of engineer-architects. “My specialty,” says Daly, 46, “is in not specializing.

Daly’s firm has just landed a prestive contract to supervise a huge construction project in Latin America. The company was picked by the State Department’s Agency for International Development’s Agency for International Development to plan and engineer a $27 million program of school and medical construction in northeast Brazil. The project will fan out over 1,500,000 sq. mil, and will include the construction of 6,500 elementary schools. 332 health centers, 22 teacher-training centers, 21 normal schools and 47 audio-visual centers plus the renovation of about 4,000 existing calssrooms. Daly will send a staff of 50 to supervise the project, but Brazilian contractors will do the construction work. Daly’s aim: to create a name and a new market for his work in Latin Americaa, where he sees both “infinite possibilities and all sorts of problems waiting to be solves.”

Beyond the Church. Daly’s father founded the firm 50 years ago to specialize in church architecture, but under Leo Jr. it was moved far afield since World War II. About half of its work is designing such military projects as blastproof silos for Titan missiles DEW-line facilities in the Arctic and the big SAC underground command post near Omaha. Dalys also designed Boeing’s big computer center in Seattlen and a $4,700,000 physics lab at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Til. Daly’s 300-man staff is now working on 60 projects worth more than $200 million, including a dormitory, research building and student center at Jesuit-run Creighton University in Oma ha that will be part of a $45 million master plan Daly created.

Unlike many architects, who accent the creative, Daly likes to stress architecture’s business side. He has devel oped a well-honed staff that seeks out technically difficult jobs that are often avoided by competitors. Daly favors boxy, square buildings, has been criticized for not being experimental and exciting. By way of answer he recalls how in college he once designed some gaudy neckties for a Baltimore com pany. “I still wonder how the poor men who bought them lived with them,” he says. “Of course, that’s what my competitors say about my work now.”

Personal Touch. Daly belongs to about 60 Omaha civic and charitable organizations, enjoys occasional travel abroad with his wife and two sons. Otherwise, he is either in his office or traveling around to the company’s five U.S. branches, where the firm offers “comprehensive architecture” by specialists who not only design a building but also select its site, choose all furnishings and suggest financing. To compensate for growing bigness and to keep the personal touch, Daly divides his experts into teams, assigning a 20-or 30-man team under a “captain” to work on a project much as a small architectural firm would. His company last year opened a New Orleans office, hoping to use it to expand into Latin America. Daly now considers that move one of his best investments.