DESMAN

DESMAN is a parking design and structural engineering consultancy founded in 1973 by John Fujiwara and the late Giri Chhabra, headquartered in New York with about 100 employees across nine offices in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Naples, Rocky Hill, Pittsburgh, McLean and New York. The firm covers the full life of a parking asset: feasibility and financial analysis, functional and mobility design, structural engineering for new structures, and restoration, maintenance and material testing for existing ones. That combination matters on repositioning work, where the question is usually whether an existing deck can be repaired economically or has to come down. DESMAN reports more than 5,000 parking projects, and is a consultant on the CLEvolution program at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.

John Fujiwara and Giri Chhabra both started their careers at T.Y. Lin International. When they set up on their own in 1973, they worked out of Fujiwara’s New York apartment and made a decision most structural engineers at the time would not have made: they turned down general work and specialised entirely in parking. To learn the type, they studied garages that were already built and standing, sorting out what had held up and what had not.

Restoration came next, in the early 1980s, and the firm grew quickly enough on the back of it to buy a competing Chicago practice, which became office number two.

That order of operations still shows in how the practice is organised. Because the same firm designs new structures and repairs old ones, it can answer the question that actually drives repositioning decisions: whether a forty-year-old deck can be economically repaired or has to come down. The restoration group also works on buildings and bridges and runs its own material testing and evaluation.

DESMAN describes itself as architects as much as structural engineers, with both disciplines in house, and it reports a 95 percent repeat business rate along with a deliberately lean staffing model that avoids markups on outside consultants.

The technology side of parking has become a service line in itself. The firm works on vehicle-idling reduction, RFID and mobile payment systems, EV and hybrid charging installations, heat-reducing roof gardens and energy-efficient HVAC, and it consults on Parksmart certification through a dedicated green parking practice.

Leadership has been unusually stable. Fujiwara remains chairman. Steve Rebora joined as a University of Illinois architecture intern in 1985 and became president in 2005. Executive vice presidents Anup Chhabra and Tim Tracy run day-to-day operations across three partner groups.