Glass houses: working with the most fragile of materials, Advanced Structures has built a reputation for craftsmanship and learned hard lessons along the way. (Small Business).

As a kid, Mic Patterson spent much of his time in the backyard trying to re-create the works of Buckminster Fuller, the architect and thinker credited with popularizing the geodesic dome.

Now president and chief executive of Advanced Structures Inc., a Marina del Rey designer/builder specializing in glass structures, Patterson has turned his childhood passion into a way of life. He has worked on projects ranging from a 170-foot glass and steel "palm tree" at a federal courthouse in Las Vegas to a 12,000-square-foot skylight in Manhattan.

But experimental work, while spectacular, can be unprofitable because it is hard to estimate costs. "1 constantly find myself in the position of trying to solve business problems I know have been solved many times in the past' said Patterson.

ASI's specialty is its system of steel trusses that makes it possible to build glass walls hundreds of feet long with a minimal amount of material--"tension structures" Patterson called them.

"It's kind of like if something is wrong with your brain and there is one surgeon who can help you," said Eric Owen Moss, a celebrated Culver City architect who recently won a competition to expand the Queens Museum of Art.

Glass beginnings

Patterson has a degree in industrial design from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. With current partners Franz Safford and Tejav Dehghanyar, he was a partner in Pearce Structures, a Chatsworth builder specializing in space frames,

The three left, Patterson said, because they had found themselves spending most of their time pushing Pearce's proprietary technology instead of designing and building.

Patterson and his partners started ASI in 1991 and a year later it was hired to help design a 49-foot glass curtain for the Eskind Biomedical Library at Vanderbilt University.

"It allowed us to launch the core of our business in terms of technology: Longspan glass walls," said Patterson.

Though the company acts as a subcontractor, its involvement can range from designing a piece of a project to taking an architect's model and building a life-sized version.

The company, with 100 employees and $17 million in annual revenues, has offices in New Jersey, Taiwan and Bangkok and plans additional offices in Shanghai and Athens (in preparation for the 2004 Summer Olympics).

Besides its core design and building business, ASI has a 30person manufacturing arm, ASI TrussWorks, in Santa Fe Springs. 'As the business grew we realized that a lot of the steel fabrication work we could just do ourselves," said Patterson.

The scale of the projects and the materials used can cause complications. One nightmare project was at T Minus 30, a Culver City film studio. ASI was asked to design and build a glass umbrella, which looks like a mass of warped potato chips rather than a hanging canopy.

After breaking each pane at least three times and consulting with Dow Corning on how to bend and mount 17, 100-square-foot glass panels without breaking them, ASI was able to finish the project. It looked great, but the firm was losing money on the project by time it was halfway through.

"They're very good and they were one of the few people who could do that work," said Peter Brown, director of field operations for Samitaur Constructs, which built the T Minus 30 building. "To them it was a challenge."

Business realities

Such projects, however costly, are regarded as an investment. "We make a business out of unique projects, so you can't be afraid of them," Patterson said.

He now says he should have made a prototype so that the kinks could have been worked out before investing so much time and money. Like most of ASI's contracts, the project carries a fixed price tag, standard practice in the construction industry.

"Owners and general contractors are not willing to take on the risk of product development on a time and materials basis," Patterson said. "They're only willing to do these types of projects if we're willing to give them a fixed price. If I run over on time and schedule and cost, I eat it."

In revising their business plan, ASI labels such work "vehicle projects"--experiments that will require new technology.

"We want those to be small, a project where if we run into a problem it's on a magnitude we can deal with;' Patterson said.

The company has also begun structuring two-phase contracts so development and prototyping costs are taken into consideration before construction begins. "There's a proposal that says if we're in budget (after the first phase) we get to go ahead and build it. If we can't, they can go ahead and give it to someone else," Patterson said.

RELATED ARTICLE: PROFILE

Advanced Structures Inc.

Year Founded: 1991

Core Business: Designer/builder of specialized structures

Revenues in 2001: $17 million

Revenues in 2002 (projected): $17 million

Employees in 2001: 100

Employees in 2002: 100

Goal: To increase revenue annually by 15 percent and achieve 15 percent profitability by year-end 2004.

Driving Force: Providing solutions that enhance the built environment through design excellence and top product quality.