By Randall S. Newton
Editor-in-Chief
Malcolm Davies, Ph.D., the CAD industry executive with the longest resume in the business, has resigned as CEO of
Gehry Technologies. He will be the new CEO of
Michelle Kaufmann Designs (MKD) of Oakland, California, an architecture firm that is moving into prefab sustainable design/build.
There is no word from Gehry Technologies at this time regarding a successor for Davies. The company was founded as a
spin-off of leading architecture firm
Gehry Partners, which has used mechanical CAD product CATIA from Dassault Systèmes to help design a number of
world-class signature architecture projects. Under Gehry Technologies the product became
Digital Project. It has sold in small quantities (numbers have never been released) to a few large architecture and construction firms. Last month Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
(SOM), one of America's largest architecture firms, announced
it would buy 100 copies of Digital Project, GT's largest sale to date. We expect an announcement in the near future about GT's next moves.
Davies' new employer was named to the
Inc. Magazine's "Green 50" List in November 2006. As the magazine noted:
Michelle Kaufmann Designs, based in Oakland, California, has helped to usher in the next generation of prefabricated housing: ecologically astute, energy-efficient, factory-built homes with modernist verve (and with approachable prices; the total cost of a home tops out at about $250 a square foot). Because they're built indoors after meticulous planning, construction waste is essentially eliminated. And the houses are beautiful, mixing elements such as geothermal heating and cooling systems with modern touches such as clerestory windows, Cor-Ten steel siding, and gliding glass doors. Her breakthrough design, the Glidehouse, is on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.
Davies has held executive positions in the CAD industry at GE/Calma, Autodesk, Cadkey, Nemetschek, Rebis, Bentley, and Gehry Technologies. He was senior vice president at Autodesk during the time of its early fast growth, and was considered by most observers to be the informal co-CEO with Al Green. He was denied the opportunity to be CEO when theAutodesk board decided to go outside the company to replace the retiring Green in 1989, choosing Carol Bartz, at the time a sales executive at Sun Microsystems.
Davies' career moves have led me to think of him as the CAD industry's patron saint of hopeless causes. He attempted to turn Cadkey (now Kubotek) into a retail powerhouse, then tried to introduce the German architecture program ALLPLAN into North America. Both times, I believe, the goal was not achieved because of ownership's unwillingness to completely implement Davies' plans. That doesn't seem to be the case at GT with Digital Practice, which suffers not from lack of ownership interest but from being based on the most expensive and most difficult to use CAD program on the market.