Jaros, Baum & Bolles (JB&B) is pleased to announce that Mark Torre, Scott Frank and Walter Mehl, Jr. have been named the firm’s new Managing Partners.
Each of the three new Managing Partners brings more than thirty years of professional experience to their new role and, having come up through the ranks of the firm together, their shared leadership of it now is marked by a strong bond of friendship as well as a profound dedication to its future. “We have a strong sense of the firm’s legacy,” Mark Torre says, “but a stronger sense of how that legacy can be leveraged into a progressive vision, a renewed culture. JB&B’s always had a reputation for having the best and the brightest. Now we want to empower the best and the brightest, engage them, give them the professional freedom and sense of ownership that will keep us at the forefront of a rapidly evolving industry.”
Mr. Torre, a Partner at the firm for over 20 years, has spearheaded the firm’s efforts on top-tier tri-state, national and international projects, with projects across all major market sectors, including the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the Moynihan Train Hall (James A. Farley Building) renovation, and 8 Spruce Street (Beekman Tower). He has also worked intensively for the past 12 years on the recently opened Hudson Yards, the history-making reimagining of Manhattan’s West Side, overseeing the MEP engineering for Towers 10, 15, 30 and 35, the Shops & Restaurants at Hudson Yards, the development’s central plaza and its urban landmark, Vessel, as well as The Shed. Of the shift from Executive Committee to Managing Partners, he notes, “Our advantage is that we already have experience running the firm. It’s not like this is being thrown at us. Our experience working together over the years has made collaboration second nature to us, our talents and personalities are complementary, and we each have real respect for the wisdom of the group.”
Scott Frank leads JB&B’s team of renowned HVAC design professionals, and counts among his more notable projects 3 and 4 World Trade Center, the Bank of America Tower, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center and Kristal Kule Finansbank HQ (Istanbul, Turkey). His extensive background with higher education projects, among them the Tata Innovation Center on the Cornell Tech campus in New York City, the Jerome L. Greene Science Center at Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus and Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México in Mexico City, is complemented by his role as the firm’s Sustainable Design leader. A founding member and current Board Chair of Urban Green Council, he serves on the New York City Energy Code Advisory Committee, and has also been actively involved in supporting the Mayor’s One City Built to Last plan. Consonant with his dedication to sustainability, Mr. Frank sees the mission of the new Managing Partners primarily in terms of stewardship: “Stewardship of the firm and of the next generation. The goal is to keep the firm at the peak market position it’s held for over a hundred years now, a position founded on excellence, commitment, and integrity, dedicated to highest performance in the service of creating the spaces where humans spend their lives. The goal is to enhance human experience through a leadership of responsibility.”
Walter Mehl, Jr. has been the driving force behind the development of JB&B Technologies, the firm’s low-voltage services arm that supports IT, security, audiovisual and RF engineering (antenna systems) design service offerings. “The rate of change at this point is phenomenal,” he notes, “—in the industry, in the culture in general. And change is essential. The trick is to tap into that change, go with it, and make your course corrections as you go along. We have a whole new generation here at the firm. And what we see is that they have the same values as the older engineers, they just have a different experience of those values. I think our next goal is to trust those values and reach out to attain a commonality of experience.” Mr. Mehl has particularly distinguished himself with large-scale commercial projects such as 745 Seventh Avenue , Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park and One Vanderbilt, and has secured a well-earned reputation for his new-construction and retrofit work in the financial industry with a client base that includes Citigroup, Nomura Securities and Barclays.
Mitchel Simpler, who has served as Managing Partner since 2012, will continue at JB&B as a Partner as he takes on his role as Chairman of the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), a voice of advocacy, political action, and business education for the engineering industry. Mr. Simpler has been at the firm since 1977, and in that time has garnered an impressive portfolio of clients, chief among them NYU Langone Health, Memorial Sloan Kettering, the New York Genome Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During his tenure as Managing Partner he oversaw the firm’s corporate restructuring as well as the total renovation of its New York office. A key element of the corporate restructuring was the creation of an Executive Committee—a triumvirate comprised of Mr. Torre, Mr. Frank, and Mr. Mehl—and sees its transition to a Managing Partnership as an organic development in the firm’s ongoing evolution. “The advantage of this kind of structure is that it provides the firm with a breadth of leadership and depth of coverage. These three people represent the finest honed skills in the business. The balance and interplay of their talents will energize the firm’s culture and position it as a 21st century firm, one that’s focused on controlled growth, both in terms of our practice and our sphere of influence, as well as on staying at the forefront of the technological and economical changes that are sweeping the industry.”
