Business
& Labor
Sandy D’Elia, Architecture Marketing Innovator, Dies
at 59
(archrecord.construction.com - 07/18/2006)
By Kevin
Lerner
Sandy D’Elia, an influential marketer
and business strategist for planning and design firms, died
June 3. He was 59. D’Elia had worked as director of development
for EDAW and wrote the 1989 book Advanced Marketing Techniques
for Architecture and Engineering Firms, which remains a definitive
book on the topic. According to Herb McLaughlin, a principal
at Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz, D’Elia moved firms beyond
responding to RFQs to actively marketing themselves as designers.
“He was so marvelously open and
friendly,” McLaughlin adds, “that people, after
meeting with him and conversing with him, felt that architecture
and design could have the same qualities.”
D’Elia earned a bachelor’s
degree in journalism from Boston University, and his architecture
degree from the University of Idaho in 1976. He practiced
architecture from 1978 to 1990 at Childs Bertman Tseckares,
Hornberger and Worstell, and KMD before joining EDAW. D’Elia
was also a member of the Society of College and University
Planners, and published numerous articles on campus planning
and design. According to a tribute prepared by EDAW, he worked
on several community and campus master plans with “an
abiding interest in the ways in which places help to define
and shape experiences.”
A memorial service was held on July
9 in Spring Lake, New Jersey, and a separate celebration of
D’Elia’s life is planned for August 11 at the Golden
Gate Club in San Francisco.
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