Michael Koo.
Michael Koo, 27
Structural engineer at HDR
Los Angeles-based structural engineer Michael Koo grew up with fashion-designing parents, but his father always loved construction, engineering and real estate.
“My dad was very hands-on,” said Koo, who was raised in Hancock Park and La Brea. “He was born in Korea. If he had been given the education, he would have been an engineer. Every time we passed a construction site, he would spend a long time examining everything.”
His father even tried to build a small condo building in L.A., but the project collapsed in 2009 amid the Great Recession.
The younger Koo, for his part, loved physics. He started his undergraduate career at the University of California-San Diego on the pre-med track, hoping to become a pediatrician. Then, as he realized how competitive that was, he decided to switch to engineering instead.
Now, four-plus years into his first full-time job at HDR, he is working on several major commercial projects throughout Southern California. His most unusual is a 75,000-square-foot desert training complex for the U.S. Navy in Niland, Calif. The sprawling multi-building complex, which is currently under construction, will include a training classroom, rooms for planning missions, a tactical operations center, a simulator room, a secure communications vault, an armory, a dormitory, and a medical examination room and fitness center.
Koo also helped design the future headquarters for the Orange County Sanitation District, a net-zero structure that’s slated to be made out of mass timber. The building, which will have two distinct office wings attached to a lobby, “kind of looks like a lobster,” Koo explained. “The claws are the wings and the torso is the main lobby.” There will be a board room, a courtyard with bike storage, and a large parking lot with canopies and solar panels on top. The building will also connect to the rest of the sanitation district’s campus via a 200-foot-long steel pedestrian bridge.
Koo is also handling the design of station canopies for new rail lines, as well as the expansion of Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, and the construction of a new hospital in Marina del Rey.
In his spare time, he’s working on an app that will help construction professionals document a construction site after they’ve walked through it and taken photos.
