President and Managing Principal, HBA Architecture + Interior Design, Inc

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.