Interface Engineering

Interface Engineering dates to 1969, when Dan Pickett and Larry McGinnis opened McGinnis Engineering in Gladstone, Oregon. The firm took its current name after adding electrical engineering and later moved its headquarters to downtown Portland. It’s a multidiscipline MEP practice known for high-performance and net-zero buildings, with mechanical, electrical, plumbing, lighting, fire/life safety, building technologies and commissioning groups. Interface counted more than 275 professionals at its 50th anniversary and now lists 12 offices from Honolulu to Washington, D.C. In 2024 it converted to a 100% employee-owned ESOP. On the Portland Art Museum Expansion and Mark Rothko Pavilion, Interface served as mechanical and electrical engineer under architects Hennebery Eddy and Vinci Hamp.

Eight service groups sit behind the MEP label, and two of them are the ones that matter most for how this firm works.

Commissioning is the first. Design and commissioning in the same practice closes a loop that is usually left open: the engineer who specified how a system should behave is in a position to verify, after the building opens, whether it actually does. Most buildings underperform their design because nobody checks, and the checking is a distinct skill from the designing.

Energy consulting is the second, and it is the discipline behind the net-zero and high-performance reputation. Modelling a building’s energy use is not the same job as sizing its equipment – it asks what the building will consume over a year under real weather and real occupancy, which is the number that decides whether a net-zero target is reachable at all.

The rest cover mechanical, electrical and plumbing design, lighting design, fire and life safety, and building technologies. Lighting as its own group is worth noting: it sits between the electrical engineering and the architecture, and firms that keep it in-house tend to produce buildings that are lit rather than merely illuminated.

Twelve offices, and the list is more interesting than a count. Portland and Bend in Oregon; Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles in California; then Denver, Chicago, New York City, Washington D.C., San Antonio and Honolulu. Honolulu is the outlier and a telling one – island projects carry their own energy economics, since generation is expensive and imported, which makes efficiency worth more there than almost anywhere else in the country.

The firm frames itself around 55 years of technical problem solving, and the conversion to 100 percent employee ownership puts the engineers who do the work on the ownership side of it.

The Portland headquarters is at 100 SW Main Street, Suite 1600, on 503.382.2266.