A glass act

Collins builds on inquisitive streak

Collins

When Ian Collins looks at the market for his company, he sees the world.

As president of Novum Structures LLC, Menomonee Falls, he oversees scores of glass- and glazed-structure projects around the world, from Madison and Detroit to Chile, Turkey, Beijing, the Philippines and Bahrain.

To say he has a global view is an understatement, and that dual fascination with structures and different cultures was fostered at a young age.

“My father was an engineer, so there was an engineering tradition in the family,” said the 52-year-old Collins, who calls Sarasota, Fla., home (at least on the weekends). “I got interested.

“The Munich Summer Olympics [in 1972] had some very impressive structures, and the Sydney [Australia] Opera House was being built. Those things are pretty amazing. I wondered how they did it. I had an inquisitiveness about how things work.”

That curiosity led him to pursue a degree in structural engineering in 1981 from the University of Surrey, Space Structures Research Centre in England.

“When I was an undergraduate, I was very interested in structures … the mathematical side,” he said. “I was invited to stay on and do research on three-dimensional spaces.

“At that point, it was kind of the infancy of computerized structural analysis. You could do things that weren’t possible before.”

In addition to envisioning new structures, Collins also enjoyed traveling. When he acquired his doctorate, he decided to pursue a path to combine those two interests.

Collins joined MERO GmbH (headquartered in Germany) in 1988 to serve as president of its U.S. company, MERO Structures Inc. In 2004, Collins, along with key MERO Structures management and an investment group, purchased the U.S. business, which launched in 2006 as Novum Structures LLC.

“The name captures our unique combination of strong German engineering heritage, international reach and flexible American attitude,” Collins said.

Among the projects that illustrate Novum’s designs are the General Motors headquarters in Detroit, the Corning Glass Museum in Corning, N.Y., Software Park in Beijing and the Milan New Trade Fair exhibit in Italy. Of all the projects he’s been involved with in 25 years, Collins said his favorite was the GM job.

“It was three separate entities — atrium, entranceway and glass walkway,” he said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find one company to do all three. That one really showed the diversity of what we do.”

But perhaps one of his prouder moments came thanks to another automaker. About two and a half years ago, Collins landed a multimillion dollar account to design illuminated glass portals for the entrances of new Toyota dealerships.

When a supplier to the project planned to pursue another direction, Collins sold the architect on Novum’s vision.

“It’s a relatively simple idea, but fairly complicated to solve,” he said.

Novum built a prototype in six to eight weeks, Collins said, and has created about 250 entrances since. That approach landed Novum a project that added about 25 percent to the company’s overall business.

“It plays to what the company is capable of,” Collins said. “How do you find that point that meets all those things [time, cost, design]? If you satisfy all those things, you have a happy customer.”

Collins maintains a global reach, traveling most of the year. And that’s exactly what he envisioned all those years ago.

“To me, what’s interesting is to see different countries, different cultures,” he said. “What you discover is there is no utopia. There’s no perfect place.

“In the end, it’s a remarkably diverse planet.”

— Sharon Verbeten