Most manufacturing conversations are about the machines. This one is about the building around them. In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer sits down with Todd Drouillard, licensed architect and principal at HED, one of the country's top science and technology design firms. For twenty-five years, Todd has designed the places where manufacturing actually happens: clean rooms, hydrogen test cells, semiconductor plants, robotics labs. A Detroit native whose father and grandfather worked the steel mills, he explains why lighting and daylight change a shop floor, why a warehouse is usually the wrong home for a production line, how architecture becomes a retention strategy, and why the best factories are buildings that work like machines themselves.

Key Takeaways

• The building is part of the process. Purpose-built factories, labs, and clean rooms are engineered around what happens inside them, and the best of them function like machines themselves.
• A warehouse is not a factory. Wide open space does not mean it's right for production. The first question is always the process, then the power, the slab, and the steel.
• Small moves change a shop floor. Lighting, color temperature, painted white structure for light reflectance, and any daylight you can introduce cost little and change how a place feels to work in.
• Architecture is a retention strategy: safe design, a clean, quiet place to step off the floor, a cafeteria, closer parking. Small things signal that the people inside matter.
• The building tells the story. A well-made facility gives employees a reason to say I work there and I build things there, and pride follows.

Chapters

• 00:00 Welcome and who Todd is
• 01:59 Icebreaker: If your life were a movie
• 4:36 What culture means to Todd
• 06:43 Wanting to be an architect at ten years old
• 10:12 The road to HED
• 12:14 Detroit roots, steel mills, and the draw to manufacturing
• 17:04 Buildings as machines
• 17:41 The first thing he looks for on a plant floor
• 18:52 When the building is wrong for the work
• 21:57 What a building does to the people inside it
• 24:07 Detroit, the middle class, and what a factory builds
• 27:27 Architecture as a retention strategy
• 30:12 Doubts, waste, and the things that drive him crazy
• 33:20 The future: robotics, AI, and keeping the human connection
• 36:55 What makes him proud
• 38:04 Defense tech, drones, and R&D spaces
• 40:40 Where to find Todd

Find Todd

LinkedIn: Todd Drouillard, AIA
HED: hed.co