Building What’s Next

Silva describes his journey with Swinerton as “a true boomerang story.” After first working for Swinerton in Los Angeles from 2005 to 2007, in 2014 he returned to the organization in the Portland division. In the intervening years, William worked as an independent consultant on projects such as bespoke Santa Barbara residences and a complex 19-block, transit oriented development. Upon returning to Oregon, he helped shape an emerging preconstruction leadership path in a division that was reemerging in the market.

Then, an opportunity arose for Silva to apply his experience on what would become one of Swinerton’s earliest and most influential mass timber opportunities: the First Tech Federal Credit Union Campus.

On First Tech, the client wanted a people-centered building connected to its natural surroundings, and the design team proposed mass timber. At the time, the system was unfamiliar to much of the construction market, including Silva. He and the project team set out to determine whether it could meet the project’s cost and schedule goals.

The results were compelling. Swinerton delivered what was at the time the largest mass timber building in the United States, coming in at 4% below the projected cost of structural steel and four months faster. More importantly, it revealed an opportunity for Swinerton to help business partners navigate design coordination, procurement, constructability, and supply-chain challenges.

As demand grew, Silva and his colleagues, including Chris Evans  recognized constraints in manufacturing capacity and fabrication expertise. Swinerton saw an opportunity to leverage its virtual design, detailing, and delivery capabilities to strengthen the broader mass timber industry. That effort evolved into the Swinerton Mass Timber group and, in 2021, Timberlab.

In 2025, Silva was selected to lead Swinerton’s national mass timber efforts; under his direction, the Mass Timber Center of Excellence transfers knowledge from nearly 100 projects into pursuit strategy, preconstruction, operations, and training and development. His vision is to expand that expertise across markets, including emerging opportunities in healthcare and industrial facilities.

For Silva, mass timber is more than a building material. It is a catalyst for stronger preconstruction, new applications of technology, and more predictable client outcomes. Leveraging Swinerton and Timberlab’s national leadership in mass timber, Silva continues to advocate for policies that expand the mass timber ecosystem and help lead Swinerton back into the woods.

Before joining Swinerton in 2008, Evans spent several years as a contractor and small business owner in Oregon, building a framing company that specialized in residential renovations and structural projects. Managing everything from business development and client relationships to field execution and team leadership built the skills and approach that have shaped his career. At Swinerton, he took roles in estimating, project management, field operations, and self-perform trade work. Each step provided a different perspective on how projects are won, planned, built, and delivered.

That perspective proved especially valuable after Evans moved to Portland in 2015. As Swinerton entered the emerging mass timber market on the First Tech Credit Union project, he found himself navigating new territory. The industry’s supplier base was still developing, and many questioned whether the largest projects could be delivered reliably. Evans believed they could. Drawing on his experience in framing, estimating, and operations leadership, he championed Swinerton’s decision to self-perform the work.

Through the First Tech project, Evans became convinced that mass timber needed a more sophisticated delivery model. After pitching the concept to Swinerton leadership, they challenged him to turn the idea into a business plan. The resulting roadmap ultimately grew into Timberlab, with Evans helping guide its evolution from a startup venture into a fully integrated mass timber company.

Vertical integration has long been the goal. Evans believes the industry needed a more sophisticated partner capable of managing procurement, manufacturing, and installation as a single solution. The approach helps owners reduce risk, improves coordination, and gives confidence that ambitious projects could be delivered successfully.

Today, Timberlab supports business partners across the mass timber life cycle, with specialists in detailing, engineering, delegated design, and design-build delivery. It is now also producing its own mass timber at the new Independence Hall manufacturing facility, underscoring the scale of Timberlab’s growth and the demand that has fueled its success.

Christopher Foster and Jason Bone are leading how Swinerton creates value for business partners before groundbreaking and long after ribbon-cutting.

“I developed a deep respect for Swinerton’s collaborative, client-first culture. I knew I wanted to be a part of that.”

Foster was brought in to transform and expand Swinerton’s Facility Solutions business line and create a consistent, scalable national program. The goal was to solve a challenge many business partners face after project completion: finding a trusted partner to handle ongoing facility needs, small projects, and day-to-day improvements that traditional construction teams are not typically structured to support.

Working with existing teams, he developed a standardized operating model to strengthen alignment and collaboration that could be applied to any Facility Solutions offering nationwide. The model accounts for individual projects as well as client-specific needs such as programmatic renovations and maintenance contracts. Since Facility Solutions can remain involved with a project after completion, teams retain and share knowledge of a facility’s history, operating requirements, and security needs, leading to faster service and fewer disruptions.

Today, Facility Solutions operates in 16 of Swinerton’s 24 office locations, and has grown from approximately $13 million in annual revenue five years ago to nearly $100 million.

Key to the model’s success has been its continuous evolution and improvement based on the recommendations and best practices shared by the 100-strong Facility Solutions team, as well as its focus on client excellence—a national extension of Swinerton’s client-centric approach.

Beyond individual projects, Facility Solutions can serve as a powerful entry point for broader business partner relationships, as well as reinforcing the relationship long after a project is done. Foster has seen service engagements with business partners like T-Mobile grow into substantial projects in Dallas, while ongoing service support at Honeywell’s headquarters in Charlotte, NC, led to an executive-floor renovation and more than $13 million in additional work.

Part of Facility Solutions’ success has been working alongside Swinerton’s National Accounts team to meet the needs of major national business partners in technology, manufacturing, and financial services. These partners appreciate the consistent national service Swinerton provides, as well as the local knowledge and care delivered by the Facility Solutions team.

As facilities management continues to develop and evolve, Foster looks to bring in technological advances that will elevate Facility Solutions’ services while maintaining the individualized attention the team prides itself on. As Foster says, his ultimate goal is to make Facility Solutions “the client’s easy button.”

There, his work expanded from project-level design management into a more holistic approach for regional and enterprise initiatives focused on team culture, external relationships, repeatable processes, risk management, and the integration of design, procurement, and phased construction.

As National Director of Design-Build, Bone focuses on sharing and expanding Swinerton’s knowledge and capabilities. Bone’s leadership philosophy centers on what he calls a people-and-clarity approach.

This means aligning teams around client goals, connecting teams with the right expertise, and making knowledge easier to access and apply across regions, disciplines, and projects. His leadership philosophy centers around a responsibility to listen, to identify what teams need, and to translate enterprise experience into practical guidance.

“Our people already hold tremendous knowledge,” he says. “The opportunity is to connect that knowledge, build on it, and make it easier and more clear for every team to apply.”

Bone’s approach informs Swinerton’s Design-Build Center of Excellence, which connects pursuit and project teams with tools and knowledge from across the enterprise. The Center of Excellence’s strategy is built around three priorities: developing people, establishing clear and repeatable processes, and equipping teams with practical tools. While regional and project leaders remain closest to their business partners and markets, the Center helps teams make more informed decisions, identify risks earlier, and benefit from experience beyond a single project or geography.

Bone has also created Swinerton’s Design-Build Advisory Group, a national network that connects local expertise with enterprise resources to share lessons, identify trends, validate best practices, and develop solutions specific to each business partner, market, and geography. The group includes representation across geographies and market sectors so that regional expertise shapes national best practices.

Looking ahead, Bone sees an opportunity to scale design integration and strengthen how teams exchange insights across estimating, self-perform, digital delivery, field operations, and emerging technology.

“The future is not simply about delivering projects,” he says. “It is about building the knowledge, capabilities, and connections that create greater value and certainty for our business partners as the preferred Design-Builder.”

With a clear strategy, better project decisions, and capabilities that carry forward from one team to the next, Bone is confident Swinerton will distinguish itself from the competition.