ACE Mentor Chicago Awards Luncheon

This past Friday, February 27th, Epstein, who is a proud sponsor of the ACE Mentor Chicago Program, attended ACE's annual Awards Luncheon held at Chicago Hilton Towers. The ACE Program engages, sponsors and mentors Chicago-area students with an interest in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry. ACE Chicago places a special focus on recruiting minority and female students; groups that are significantly under-represented in the construction and design industry. ACE Chicago also financially supports each student's continued success through scholarships and grants. Since 2000 ACE has awarded 445 scholarships totaling more than $1 Million!

Representing Epstein at the event, which honored firms, institutions and individuals for their support of ACE Chicago, was Criss Paccione-Anderson and Randy Buescher (both board members of ACE Chicago) as well as Jim Jirsa, Laura Flores, Jennifer Heiney, Noel Abbott, Ryan Lezcano, & Stu White. In addition, we were pleased to also have Carolyn Isaacson, a 'graduate' from the ACE program and now an architect at Altus Works and mentor for ACE as well as current ACE mentee Jeanette Perez sit with us.

As part of the luncheon a friendly design and engineering contest was held amongst the 600 guests in attendance. The object of the challenge was to construct a tower in 10 minutes comprised solely of marshmallows & 5 inch wood sticks that was at least 15" high. Epstein's 'design' was led by Ryan, a structural engineer, with input from our director of architecture, Randy, and two of our project architects Laura and Jen as well as Carolyn. So on paper it looked like we were in good shape when it came to being able construct a structurally sound edifice that had some design elegance to it as well. Well just like the Bulls are learning right now having a good looking paper team doesn't necessarily mean victory. Let's just say that our 'tower' which had aspirations for being a Meisian dream turned out to resemble a Frank Gehry nightmare!

In defense of Ryan and our architects it probably didn't help that they were playing with dead design weight from Noel, Criss and Jim all members of our corporate services group who were better at eating the marshmallows than actually constructing them! If you were curious Stu, our director of MEP engineering, was totally perplexed by this design challenge and couldn't figure out where the HVAC equipment should go!