Commodore's Bright Future

In March and April, Commodore Builders booked $35M in projects. Added to what Joe Albanese's 8-year-old firm already has, it's good through early next year, aided by 14 new hires to the 80-person team. We snapped Joe, Stacy Roman, Tim LeBlanc, Rich Healey,Bob Otto, Mark Nelson, and Jim Loud mulling over plans for a 54k SF gut renovation they just started for Bluefin Robotics. The MIT spin-off develops and manufactures unmanned subs that do underwater surveillance for the Navy and oil company deep-sea rigs. (Now where would that come in handy?) Bluefin is uprooting from Cambridge to move into the Quincy Naval Shipyard. It expects to move into the new space by early fall, which will mark the first time the entire company has been under one roof.
Here's Joe, man of action, at a dodgeball game two weeks ago. He is a work-hard-but-remember-to-have-fun kinda? guy. For the past 28 years, he's had parallel careers in the Boston construction industry and in the Navy. Last fall, he retired as a Captain and Commodore of the Seventh Naval Construction Regiment. Between his Navy chores, he launched his own company that grew as high as 135 last year, before recession cuts.
Commodore has four business lines: corporate, institutional, life science, and healthcare. We snapped its academic team: standing left of stairs, Biagio DiTullio, Brian Baynes, Sarah Hotchkiss,Sean Harrington, and on the stairs from the bottom Laurent Sika,Harry Martins, Nick Brown, Jean Benoit, Dave Conner, and John Kelly. We convinced them to experience a moment of quiet during their mad, summer slammer season. This year, they're doing 13 projects on eight campuses including: labs at MIT, a food-service area at Wellesley, and conversion of a historic residence into academic offices at BC.
Sometimes the CEO just has to be Top Dog, or at least the tallest guy in the hallway. That's why a laughing Joe stood on a box for this shot. We snapped him with his corporate interiors team: Kari Iadonisi, Sarah Stewart, and Jim Stadler. One project they're doing is the build-out for Cambridge Innovation Center's 50k SF expansion at One Broadway. After about six months of planning, construction just started and will be completed in August. CIC provides office space for start-ups and Joe finds CIC CEO Tim Rowe to be a fascinating client: ?Tim puts himself in the users? shoes and considers every detail from light switches to sight lines.

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