PK Associates

PK Associates is a consulting structural engineering firm founded in 1992 and headquartered on East McDonald Drive in Scottsdale, Arizona. It also runs offices in the Denver area, opened in 2015, and San Diego, plus Pimara Paul Koehler, a Native American partnership. The firm designs structures for multifamily and mixed-use towers, offices, hospitality, sports and retail, and it has engineered more than 500 Discount Tire stores. In Tempe, PK Associates is the structural engineer on McCarthy’s Anchor Campus, which converts a 12-acre hotel and conference site into a training hub. SmithGroup is architect and MEP engineer, and McCarthy is owner, developer and builder.

Registration in 49 states, with the fiftieth stated as a work in progress, is what lets a four-office firm take work anywhere a developer owns land. It also explains the shape of the service list, which leans toward the problems that follow a building rather than only the design that precedes it.

Alongside conventional structural design sit seismic design, performance based design, dynamic analysis and progressive collapse analysis. Then come the review and investigation services: structural system evaluation, special structural inspections, structural peer review and forensic engineering. The firm is certified to perform peer reviews, and co-founder Jack Koehler holds City of Phoenix Self-Certified Professional status for plan reviews, which can take a permit review out of the municipal queue. Both co-founders hold California Safety Assessment Program training for evaluating buildings after an earthquake or other disaster.

Leadership runs to ten principals and partners, among them a Director of QA and a dedicated BIM Director, the latter reflecting that building information modeling is sold as a service rather than treated as drafting overhead. Design-build and integrated project delivery are both offered alongside traditional design-bid-build.

The office network pairs Scottsdale headquarters at 7434 East McDonald Drive with a Greenwood Village, Colorado office serving Denver-area work since 2015, and a San Diego office on Voltaire Street handling California projects. A fourth entity, Pimara Paul Koehler, LLC, was created in 2010 and is owned by an enrolled member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, operating from North Gilbert Road in Mesa, which gives clients a route to Native American business participation on qualifying work.

The current featured project on the firm’s homepage is Northrop Grumman Spectrum V.