UMC’s story began in 1920 when two brothers — Frank and William Granston — opened University Plumbing and Heating right next to the University of Washington. The company grew steadily, becoming a general purpose mechanical contracting firm in the 1960s and changing its name to University Mechanical Contractors. In the same decade, UMC handled all the plumbing and mechanical work for the Space Needle, which was built from the ground up in a staggering 400 days for the 1962 World’s Fair.

Like CAD (Computer Aided Design) before it, Building Information Modeling (BIM) was a revolutionary advancement in the construction industry, allowing designers and engineers to model an entire 3D structure, fully loaded with data to a degree that even the smallest change in the model is automatically accounted for and adjusted model-wide. BIM allows architects, structural engineers, project managers and contractors to collaborate through every step of a construction process in ways that were largely impossible before.