BCBUSINESS.CA JULY/AUGUST 2017 BCBUSINESS 49
stateside clients, he reckons. Mean-
while, B.C. subtrades have built a
clientele down south. For example,
Burnaby-based New way Concrete
Forming Ltd. has a Seattle branch.
LMS
Reinforcing Steel Group and Starline
Windows Ltd., both headquartered in
Surrey, have outposts in California and
Washington State, respectively.
Like B+B's Zwick, Glotman fell victim
to the 2008 meltdown: from 30 to 40
per cent of his business, jobs in Southern
California fell to zero. "Right now, I can
say to you that we have a ton of work in
the U.S. and everything's fantastic, but
they tend to build up and then they have
a crash," he says. "I'm not sure how long
this real estate cycle will last in the U.S."
As the province's engineers and
subtrades make a big impression in
America, its architects have gone
global. Don Kasian reckons that as
much as two-thirds of his •rm's work
is outside B.C., in places like the Mid-
dle East, Europe and China. "Going
through a number of recessions in
the world, you realize that diversity is
really important," says the president
of Kasian Architecture Interior Design
and Planning Ltd., 120 of whose 350
staff work in Vancouver. "Plus you
can grow. You have more things to
practise on, and you get better."
Bing Thom Architects (
BTA) oper-
ates out of a low-slung building in the
shadow of the Burrard Bridge, but the
50-employee ¡irm also has of¡ices in
Hong Kong and Washington, D.C. Prin-
cipal Michael Heeney, who joined
BTA in
1989, explains that founder Bing Thom
designed several pavilions for Expo 86
early in his career. That led to projects
in Thom's native Hong Kong during the
1990s, when
BTA also won an interna-
tional competition to design the new
northeastern Chinese city of Dalian.
The ¡irm's work on
UBC's Chan
Centre for the Performing Arts, com-
pleted in 1997, has helped it land
commissions such as Xiqu Centre, a
US$350-million Chinese opera house
in Hong Kong that is scheduled for
completion next year. Although
BTA
mostly does institutional architecture,
it works with Westbank—as Heeney told
colleagues at a recent conference in
Philadelphia. "They said—and this was
someone who doesn't live in Vancouver—
