-: I'm Bruce Prichard, I'm the managing principal
of HBA Architecture and Interior Design,
which is a regional firm in Virginia.
I am in what we call the Commercial Studio,
so I work mostly with corporate clients,
financial institutions, things like that.
We also have a Community Studio that does
schools and libraries and municipal centers
and we have, being in Virginia Beach,
we have a Federal Studio that works with,
mostly with Navy projects.
My role is, as the managing principal is,
you know, first of all I'm a practicing architect,
so I do my own projects, I'm involved in
meeting with the clients, assessing their needs,
designing a solution that meets their needs
and then also with developing the documents
and working with the contractors to realize
the completion of the project.
And then the other part of my job
as the managing principal is I do the,
all the business part of the firm's operations,
which is insurance and legal and financial
and all those kinds of things.
We have a really diverse practice.
I do projects that are as small as 1000 square feet
and cost $100,000, right now I'm working on
a $35 million project for a major
corporate industrial client.
We do, in the Community Studio, we do projects
that go up to $100 and $120 million.
New high schools, new multiple school projects
and things like that.
We start by programming, which is what we call
the process by which we develop the client's needs
and find out what their objectives are.
We work through, the phases are formally,
they have formal names in the profession,
so after programming we do schematic design,
which is basically the concepts.
It's the general, how things fit together functionally,
what kind of aesthetic statement we're trying to
make with the building or the project.
And once that's approved by the client
we start to then develop the design and get into
the technical aspect of how the building is built,
how the different components go together
and do actually construction documents,
even though we do things entirely different now
than when we started, we still wind up with
a set of documents that describe what the contractor's
responsibility is to build the project.
I mean, I started in the day when we used
a pencil and paper and the, basically the way
buildings have been designed for thousands of years
and I went through the transition of the early
computer days to where we were just using computers
to produce the same things that we had been
producing with a pencil and paper before
and now we're at the point where the computers,
we're basically building the building inside
the computer so that there's a virtual building
before there's ever an actual building.