Preston Haskell

Preston Hampton Haskell, III is founder and former chairman of The Haskell Company, the largest privately held construction company in Florida and a top design/build firm in the United States. He was also a minority owner of the National Football League Jacksonville Jaguars. In 2011, he was named a "Florida Icon" by Florida Trend magazine. Education He was born as Preston Hampton Haskell III, in October 1938, into a prominent family in Birmingham, Alabama. When he was young, he was fascinated by building construction, and enjoyed looking at how structures were put together. He graduated with the second graduating class in 1956 from Indian Springs School in Shelby County, Alabama; attended Princeton University and earned a Civil engineering degree with honors in 1960; received an MBA with distinction from Harvard in 1962; and continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Building Engineering and Construction. Career When Haskell left MIT, he settled in Jacksonville, Florida and was employed by the S. S. Jacobs Company. Developer James Winston encouraged Haskell to break out on his own and gave the Preston H. Haskell Company their first project in 1965. The company successfully designed and built a $1 million apartment complex at Atlantic Beach. It began to develop a reputation for quality work on time and within budget. During the 1950s, the American Institute of Architects in Florida supported the traditional role of an architect to design projects, and was a powerful professional organization. They would not allow AIA members to be employed by a contractor who offered design/build services, which made it more difficult for contractors to recruit architects to such projects. Haskell shortened his company's name to The Haskell Company in 1978, when he had a new logo designed and also added the phrase, "Architects/Engineers/Contractors". Describing this tagline as "significant", Preston Haskell said: