Who would have thought that my career as a project manager would lead me back to my birth place (I won’t say how many years later), at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center.
Aside from my own history there, Giroux Glass has also built a long-term relationship with Kaiser, though in a different way, having provided glass and glazing services to numerous medical centers over the years. Most recently, our glazing team completed an outdoor healing garden project at Kaiser LAMC, after beginning the initial pre-planning stages for it late last year.
We teamed up with Kaiser Construction and Facilities Services and Sautter Architecture to help construct the healing garden, complete with a soothing water feature to help calm visitors. Our task was to fit, order, and install 44-inch glass windscreen with blue/green safety laminate glass, as well as two custom glass gates, shown below.
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For me and my work, each project I’m a part of tends to take on a life of its own. I naturally become attached. This sort of natural connection to a job (in addition to my own prior field experience) became useful as we were faced with the logistical challenges of a complex gradual slope with 90-degree U-shaped returns, followed with straight runs to repeat U-shaped returns. Glaziers are trained to build off of high points—this was the opposite. In the end, we maintained 44-inches from the low point and leveled accordingly to create the look achieved and shown in these photos.
Our field crew was ultimately the icing on the cake that was this project. The team included Jorge Puente, Alex Barrios, Rob Neal, Martin Gutierrez, and Marcus Belt. Alan Shook, one of our talented superintendents, was instrumental in guiding our dynamic field crew along the way. Further thanks to my support in the Giroux Glass Los Angeles office: director of High-End Design Brad Leslie, chief estimator Rob Carter, project engineer Abraham Cinto, and CAD technician Jenny Jimenez.
I would also like to thank C.R. Laurence Co., Inc.’s Jose Quinones, Trulite’s Wardi Bisharat, and Tint Matters’ Joe Lima, for their assistance with materials used in this project.
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