Jeff Jenner

Project Architect/Construction Observer

Although he’s officially a member of our Gurnee, Illinois studio, Jeff Jenner, AIA spends most of his time at the construction site. Jeff has led construction administration on almost every project he’s worked on since his internship in the early 1990s. These projects range from the $35 million new Student Center at the College of Lake County’s Lakeshore Campus in Waukegan, Illinois to a $70 million senior living facility in Austin, Texas.

Jeff, a licensed architect, has worked at firms in Tampa Bay, DC, and most recently, at Perkins Eastman in Chicago. He is no stranger to long-lasting projects. One of his pre-Legat projects took nearly five years to finish. Because of client requests and budget changes, his team had to redesign it four times, reduce the construction cost by 75%, resubmit for permit four times, and deal with the contractor and construction manager getting fired during the CD phase. And yet, the project not only got built, but also was a great success on the sales side.

Jeff remembers sketching buildings, towns, and cities at seven or eight years old. He took a drafting class during his junior year in high school. That same year, he was searching professional degrees at his local library and landed on architecture—that’s when he realized this was something he wanted to do.

Jeff earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He grew up in Chicago’s southwest suburbs, where he and his friends often rode their bikes to a popular ice cream shop called Dove Candies. There they would pay 75 cents for delicious, chocolate-covered ice cream bars twice the size of what they are now. That company would go on to invent the famous Dove Bar.