Bob Grottenthaler Barton Mallow Company

2010 Hall of Fame Inductee

Bob Grottenthaler graduated from Penn State, Class of 1980. He graduated with a B.A.E., choosing the “Environmental” option. Bob landed his first job after graduation at Blum Consulting Engineers located in Dallas, Texas. He started working in their lighting design department and stayed there for about a year and a half. While in Dallas, Bob attended night school at Southern Methodist University (SMU) for his MBA. After attending SMU for three years, Bob joined Henningson, Durham, & Richardson, better known as HDR, where he was involved with mechanical design. At HDR, Bob worked on designing various hospitals and prisons, both very complex buildings. Bob eventually realized he wanted to get into construction management and soon enough he was working on a CM assignment for CRSS. Bob went to Michigan for thirteen months to build a replacement hospital for the University of Michigan. Afterwards, Bob relocated to Virginia to build UVA’s replacement hospital. After staying in UVA for three years, he left to join Barton Malow Company.

Bob will celebrate his 20-year anniversary with Barton Malow on February 26, 2013. With Barton Malow, Bob started out as a project manger, senior project manager, project director, senior project director, and then eventually became vice president in 2003. Bob is in charge of Barton Malow’s operations in Maryland and also deals with construction work in Delaware and Pennsylvania. He oversees the business planning process and helps bring on talent and winning work. He also selects what markets he would like to target while simultaneously observing new markets due to specific slower marketplaces. In 1999, Bob won the Beaver Stadium Expansion and Renovation project at Penn State, with a construction cost of $93,000,000. About a year and a half ago, Bob also won the Penn State South Halls Renovation project, which cost $82,000,000. Bob’s most recent project win, which was assigned about 5 months ago, is Penn State’s South Frear, Mueller, and Whitmore buildings, which Barton Malow just began working on and will approximately cost $35,000,000.

Bob is not only heavily involved with Penn State, but especially involved with PACE. From 1998 to now, Bob has been on the PACE Advisory Board and has attended almost every roundtable and seminar event each year. He has even presented at some of these events. From 1999 to 2007, Bob has visited classrooms and has given guest lectures on certain topics of interest to students in AE 475 and 476. Bob is a juror for senior thesis presentations and each year, he oversees the decision regarding which top AE student will receive recognition from the Barton Malow Excellence Fund. For his efforts, Bob received PACE’s Excellence Award in 2005 and was elected into PACE’s Hall of Fame in 2010, followed by becoming an AE Centennial Fellow in 2010. Bob is also a board member and the Vice President of Penn State’s Alumni Society of Architectural Engineers (ASAE) and is a mentor for Penn State’s Student Society of Architectural Engineers (SSAE). SSAE has a blog, which each ASAE board member writes in every month. This past December, Bob wrote an article titled “Working in Collaborative Project Environments.” Bob’s biggest project that he has won in his career so far is the Health Sciences Facility III for the University of Maryland in Baltimore. It is a $204,000,000 project and Bob was a senior role as the Project Executive. It was a 332,000 square feet project that included research laboratories, vivarium, nano medicine, and a high-end imaging suite. Bob’s favorite projects that he has worked on so far have been the Penn State Beaver Stadium renovation, the UVA replacement hospital, and the Dental School at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. Bob likes to work on facilities that have meaning behind them, such as educational institutions and healthcare facilities. Bob is a registered Professional Engineer in Pennsylvania and Texas. He is also a DBIA Designated Design-Build Professional and a LEED Accredited Professional, specializing in Building Design and Construction (BD+C). The accomplishment that he is most proud of is Barton Malow receiving awards from Maryland Minority Contractors Association for Best Practices in Contracting and Business Diversity Achievement for the years of 2009 and 2010. Bob currently resides in Bel Air, Maryland and enjoys traveling to Europe and the Carribean. He is married and has three daughters who live in Pennsylvania.