Ideas in harness

Published On: April 1, 2016
Photos by Cory Rossiter

Photos by Cory Rossiter

Michael Lester doesn’t shy away from a challenge. He builds a team of fellow innovators and comes up with tensioned fabric solutions.

“We’re always innovating,” says Michael Lester, managing director of MakMax Australia Pty. Ltd. in Brisbane, Australia, a world-renowned company building custom membrane structures and manufacturing a range of shade products. “We’ve always got new products in our minds and are working to bring them to market.”

Lester’s introduction to working with tensioned fabric structures came while he was still studying for his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Queensland and working as a consulting engineer. He was brought in to work on an approximately 1,000-square-meter canopy for the World Expo 88, held in Brisbane. “After looking at how to do that work, I checked out subcontracting options and decided instead to learn as much as I could and engineer it myself,” he says. “That pretty much shaped the rest of my career.” (The structure was relocated to Biloela in central Queensland after the expo, and is still in use.)

Lester eventually became a partner in the consultancy, which he sold out of in 1997 to buy into Shade Structures Pacific. In 2000 that company became a subsidiary of Amherst, N.Y.-based Birdair Inc. In 2005 ownership passed directly to the Taiyo Kogyo Corp. based in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. “That’s been a very fruitful relationship for me because Taiyo Kogyo Group is the largest tension structure organization in the world, and they’re also very collegiate in their treatment of the various companies and subsidiaries around the world, and with that comes access to skills from all the countries [in that group],” Lester says.

Makmax-Michael-Lester-1Define the challenges

MakMax projects range from standard umbrellas of 2 to 3 square meters to its biggest project at the moment, Perth Stadium in Burswood, Western Australia—a multipurpose 35,000-square-meter PTFE venue. Lester and his team of engineers, project managers and construction experts embrace the challenges that come with each new project in tender and kick-off meetings where a free-flowing exchange of ideas is the expectation.

“Each project has its challenges, and the very first challenge is to work out what those challenges are,” he says. “Being able to do that comes from experience and knowledge and having a really good team that can build the projects in their heads, so they can anticipate what problems might arrive and take steps to solve those problems before starting any of the real design.”

People ask me all the time what I look for in a person when I’m interviewing them. And the answer is: I’m looking for something they do in the real world that indicates a joy of working with their hands creating things. It might be sailing or building model planes or racing cars—anything that indicates a manual, creative bent in which they’re putting their mind to creating physical things.

The design challenge that Perth Stadium presented included not only its large scale but also some novelties with potentially incompatible materials, which drove Lester and his team to innovate a purpose-designed extrusion in order to avoid the use of side-welded closures on the project. “I had been thinking about the problem for years and had in mind a detail that I had used many years ago on a project in Hong Kong,” Lester says. “What we came up with for this case was an extension of that solution.”

The technical solution that MakMax developed for the extrusions was not only effective, it also saved a significant amount of labor during installation, and was what won the company the project, Lester says.

Makmax-Michael-Lester-10-2Dangerous opportunities

Lester’s team is also working on the Queensland State Velodrome for the 2018 Commonwealth Games to be held on the Gold Coast near Brisbane. The original architecture called for a steel roof, but the contractor that won the project had worked with MakMax in the past and preferred fabric over steel, so MakMax won the project as an alternate. “Fabric was a very suitable material for this three-dimensional roof shape because fabric follows the curves better,” Lester says.

The particular challenge with this project had to do with providing drainage control with the low-gradient roof. “We used a few of our old details to come up with a solution that allows free drainage of the roof without funneling the water into internal roof gutters,” Lester says. “So we not only avoided the expense of internal roof gutters, but we managed to keep the pure form of the roof that the architect designed.”

With projects such as the Velodrome and Perth Stadium, in which the MakMax team is developing new products, Lester maintains a high level of involvement, especially during the initial stages. “I go to a lot of the initial meetings, not to keep them on track, but to make sure I know that our team is looking after all the details, because while those types of projects are opportunities—they’re dangerous opportunities,” he says. “Things can go wrong.”

He also points out that developing new products and bringing them to market is an expensive endeavor. “You’ve got to develop a new product, and then there are the prototype costs and design costs,” Lester says. “And unfortunately those costs can’t be covered on the very first version of the project.”

A new way to use fabric

Even more exciting to Lester is a partnership his company has with the University of Queensland, developing a revolutionary new product for solar- and geothermal-power generation. MakMax developed the first prototype last year and is now in the process of commercializing it. “We have, of course, enormous solar resources but a lot of geothermal resources as well,” Lester says. “This is particularly exciting because it is really suitable for medium-scale distributed power generation, and to my knowledge it’s a new application of fabric to an area that hasn’t been developed before.”

In-house design

Lester credits his company’s in-house design capabilities as one of the components to its success. “Some other companies might have a junior engineer or someone like that involved, but we’ve got the full team—architects, engineers, drafters,” he says. “The advantage is that we can better understand the design and cost issues associated with either a tender or project in hand and that just gives us a better ability to deliver on clients’ expectations.”
There is a drawback, however, Lester admits; but the tradeoff is worth it. The downside of having an in-house design team is that it’s a fixed cost that the business has to carry “and we are less flexible because of that,” he says.

Building an innovative team

Building a team that is willing and eager to find creative solutions to fabrication challenges is something Lester also excels at, and that starts with the hiring process. “People ask me all the time what I look for in a person when I’m interviewing them,” he says. “And the answer is: I’m looking for something they do in the real world that indicates a joy of working with their hands creating things. It might be sailing or building model planes or racing cars—anything that indicates a manual, creative bent in which they’re putting their mind to creating physical things.

“It’s probably the greatest indicator of aptitude—and far greater than university results.”