Affiliated Engineers

Affiliated Engineers is a consulting engineering firm founded in Madison, Wisconsin and now working from 23 offices across the United States, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington. The practice covers mechanical, electrical, plumbing, technology and central utility design, with a concentration in research, healthcare, higher education and science and technology facilities. Affiliated Engineers designed the new Fontaine Central Energy Plant serving the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Virginia, an all-electric plant with no combustion at all, running geoexchange with heat-recovery chillers and thermal storage. Central utility work of that kind is where the firm’s campus-scale energy practice concentrates.

The Madison office was established in 1978 and it is still both the firm’s first and its largest. The address, 5802 Research Park Boulevard, sits in a research park a short distance from the University of Wisconsin campus that supplies much of its regional work. Peter Starkweather founded the practice. Ken Meschke and Greg Quinn are among the principals there now.

Eight service lines make up the offer: mechanical, electrical, plumbing and piping, and fire protection engineering, electric power and substation design, commissioning, technical planning, and building performance analysis. Substation design sitting alongside building MEP is worth noting, because it means the firm can take a campus from the utility connection through to the room, which is exactly the scope large research and data center clients struggle to procure in one place.

The project list is heavily weighted toward buildings where the engineering is the difficult part. Stanford Energy Systems Innovations replaced a combustion-based campus plant with heat recovery. The Gary L. Thomas Energy Engineering Building at UT Austin, the NIH’s Porter Neuroscience Research Center Phase 2, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science are all research facilities where mechanical performance sets the limits on what the science can do.

Markets extend past research and healthcare to aerospace, aviation, data centers, federal government, higher education, advanced manufacturing, process industries, and energy and utilities.

The firm remains privately held.