Former student creates CRS Center
facility management endowment

An endowment recently established by a former student will enhance the ability of a Texas A&M’s College of Architecture research center to connect academia with the facility management industry.
                               
With a $25,000 gift to the CRS Center for Leadership and Management in the Design and Construction Industry, John Garcia, who earned a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree in 1983 and a Master of Architecture degree in 1985, established the Alpha Facilities Solutions Excellence Endowment. The donation will support facility management teaching, research and outreach, as well as the center’s Graduate Certificate in Facility Management program.

Garcia is a senior program manager for facility asset and management programs and the managing director of Alpha Facilities Solutions, a San Antonio-based facility asset management consulting firm.

Through his firm, said Valerian Miranda, CRS Center director, Garcia demonstrates that effectively managing the built environment is not just financially profitable, but it makes good sense. He also understands, Miranda said, that everyone benefits when academia and industry collaborate.

“Alpha Solutions is in the vanguard of redefining what facility management
encompasses in a social and economic climate where there is growing
awareness of the importance of our stewardship of the built environment,” said Miranda.

The endowment, said Miranda, a first for the college’s facility management program, makes it possible for the CRS Center to extend its efforts in the scholarship of facility management by providing resources to foster more meaningful collaborations between academia and industry on a continuing basis.

Garcia has provided the college with a unique gift, said Larry Zuber, the college’s senior director of development, in that it funds a mission rather than a professorship or scholarship. “We welcome these kinds of gifts too,” he said.

In addition to advancing innovation and leadership in the design and construction industry, the CRS Center is the repository of the business archives, slide archives, publications and architectural program library of its namesake, the architecture engineering and planning firm Caudill Rowlett Scott and its successor firm CRSS.

The center’s current research focuses on the impact of information technology on facility management.

- Posted: Feb. 25, 2011 -

Contact:   Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.