Greenway Flats at Sunrise

We wrapped up the Greenway Flats project about a year ago, so I headed down early one morning in July to photograph the building at sunrise. In the early spring when I scouted the building for a photo shoot, the morning sun missed the northern-facing entrance altogether. In July it worked out just right and I got some dramatic photos looking east and west across the buildings’ main entrance.

Greenway Flats is an apartment building for the chronically homeless of Colorado Springs. The permanent living space managed by the Springs Rescue Mission is a safe place for nearly 70 people to call home. 

Greenway Flats is more than a place to sleep. Support services offered in the building include access to computers, a small library, a TV lounge, a laundry room, and community garden spaces.  Residents can attend job skills training courses and enjoy meals with other residents in the dining hall, or meet with case managers.  Also, this month PikeRide Colorado Springs bike-share non-profit added a new PikeRide station at Greenway Flats. The partnership between Springs Rescue Mission and PikeRide provides free bike share memberships, helmets, and gear for Springs Rescue Mission clients.

HB&A is proud to have worked with the City of Colorado Springs, Nor’wood Development Group, and other community partners to open Colorado Springs’ first permanent supportive housing complex that supports the “housing first” approach to ending homelessness. — Cathy

We all scream for ice cream

Staff enjoyed a quick (and safely distanced) visit from the ice cream truck last week. It was the perfect reprieve from the hot day!

Adolfo Valles joins HB&A

Welcome to HB&A Adolfo!

Meet Adolfo, our newest member of the HB&A architectural design team. Adolfo joins HB&A from his home state of New Mexico. 

In his new position at HB&A Adolfo will be creating renderings, preparing construction documents, recording field measurements, and more. His diverse work experience and natural design ability will be an asset to HB&A.

In his spare time, Adolfo looks forward to exploring Colorado on his road bike and getting to know the Colorado Springs community.

Welcome to the HB&A team, Adolfo!

The HB&A team portrait at Casa Mundi

The HB&A team walked over to the newly opened Casa Mundi in early March (before social distancing was required) for a staff photoshoot with Ethan of Flyby Aerial Imagery. Ethan did a great job capturing the staff, Pikes Peak, and the facade of Casa Mundi all in one 25-second video. Take a look!

Springs in Bloom

Last week the HB&A team got their hands dirty planting Marigolds, Green and Red Pennisetum, Red Geraniums, and Red Salvia in the flowerbed located in the median on South Tejon and Las Animas for Springs in Bloom. Springs in Bloom is an annual volunteer planting program that encourages local residents, clubs, and businesses to adopt one of 52 flower beds located throughout Colorado Springs. This is the 9th year that HB&A has adopted a flowerbed.

Andrea, Jamaal, James, Liz, and Tom C. planted the flowers based on a design by Devon. Wearing masks and observing the appropriate social distance the team posed for a photo op once the planting was complete.

This year the team is hoping to take home the “Golden Trowel Award.” HB&A has been nominated several times but has yet to take home the Trowel trophy.

Adopt a median or learn more about the “Springs in Bloom” program here.

HB&A now a certified Women-Owned Small Business

Pictured L-R, the owners of HB&A: Tino Leone, Steve Powell, Carrie Higgs, Amy Umiamaka, Andrea Barker, Mike Richardson, and Aaron Briggs.

HB&A was recently certified as a Woman-Owned Small Business (WOSB) by the U.S Small Business Administration. The new ownership structure builds on HB&A’s 48 years of designing and planning excellence and opens up new opportunities to compete for government contracts that have been set aside specifically for WOSBs as well as the potential for supporting larger firms on bigger contracts.

Principals Amy Umiamaka, Carrie Higgs, and Andrea Barker recently invested enough in the company for it to be qualified as a majority woman-owned firm.

“The transition to a woman-owned small business allows us to serve as role models in the architecture/engineering/construction industry - and more importantly here in our community,” says  Andrea Barker, Principal and HB&A’s Director of Business Development.

Our commitment to diversity does not stop at the top. We have an equal number of women and men in technical positions. Compared to the 2016 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics nationwide average where women accounted for only 14 percent of full-time professionals in architecture and engineering.

According to the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the number of women architects continues to grow. As of 2018, women account for nearly half of the students in architecture schools in the U.S.; they make up about 40% of those taking licensing exams, an increase of nearly 50 percent in 20 years.

All three women partners are actively involved in the day-to-day operations here at HB&A. Their leadership is apparent in their work and their involvement in the local community and beyond.

Amy Umiamaka started at HB&A in 1993, she was promoted to Principal in 2007. Notable work includes planning and architecture projects for the Air Force at Schriever, Peterson, Buckley, and FE Warren Air Force Bases, as well as the Air Force Academy. Most recently Amy has been working to document the requirements for the new USSpaceCom Headquarters Facility and will provide conceptual design once the location is finalized.  Amy currently occupies the office of Secretary for the Pikes Peak Post of the Society for Military Engineers (SAME).

Carrie Higgs started at HB&A in 2002, she was promoted to Principal in 2014. Higgs has worked with the United States Air Force at Royal Air Force bases Croughton, Mildenhall, and Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense around the country and the world. Carrie’s current work includes projects for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Andrea Barker joined HB&A in 1992, she was promoted to Director of Business Development in 1998. In 2007 Barker became a principal. Andrea is part of HB&A’s management team and leads the effort to generate new business. Currently, Andrea is a member of the board at the Colorado Springs Chamber and Economic Development Council and Pike Ride. Andrea has also served on the following Pikes Peak area boards: The Culture Office of the Pikes Peak Region (COPPeR), the Greenway Fund, and Innovations in Aging Collaborative.

Housing in Colorado Springs

Our own James McMurray (representing the Urban Land Institute) and Casa Mundi's Darsey Nicklasson discussed housing in Colorado Springs with Shannon Brinias on KRDO Newsradio's "The Extra". Take a listen!

Darsey Nicklasson, Principal at DHN Planning & Development (Case Mundi and Blue Dot Place) and James McMurray, Executive Committee Member of Urban Land Institute and Senior Planner at HB&A.

Tips for importing 3D DWG into Sketchup 2019; CAD and Colors

If your workflow is anything like mine, you import 3D DWGs into SketchUp often.

In all previous versions of SketchUp, this would come in with the default material applied. However, if you’re using SketchUp 2019, regardless of whether you check or uncheck the “Import Materials” option…

…Your model will probably come in with colors arbitrarily assigned by the program to each layer you have in CAD *AND* it applies those colors as materials to the model.

The particularly unfortunate part of this is Sketchup 2019 will apply colors to both the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ face of each plane (the white and the medium grey face respectively if you’re using the default material), so if you apply new materials to the visible face of anything, the color will remain inside your objects.

Outside/visible face with a new material applied

Inside the same wall

This occurs even if you triple-click, bounding box the whole model, or any other method to select “everything” in an object because SketchUp 2019 by default does not apply materials to the inside face of a plane if it already has a non-default material assigned to it.

If you want your model to be ‘basic’ in a rendering with no suggestion of materials - just a plain white box - this adds extra time to the workflow to go in and individually assign a white or default material to things where you didn’t have to before.

If you DO want materials on your model, for things like walls which are solid objects, this is more of an annoyance for neat freaks who want models to be ‘the way they should be’ and don’t like the colors occasionally showing through at the edges (like me). But in the case of materials like glass, you won’t actually be able to see through your glass if you don’t update the interior face material to match the exterior face material and your glass will look like whatever color was arbitrarily assigned to it when you imported the dwg, because the exterior face is transparent.  Bright red windows usually aren’t a look we’re going for. Depending on the complexity of your model, and for example how many components you had in Revit, this can be tedious to fix.

Immediately after your DWG import, go to the materials toolbar and hit the little house button at the top of the swatch pane.

That will show you what materials are currently in the model. If you then click the black arrow at the right side of the box with a menu box inside of it for additional options, you will see an option to “Delete all.”

Click the “Delete all” option and *poof* everything is restored to the default material.

Nice, clean, default-material model again, with none of the issues listed above.

If you are importing a DWG to a model you already have materials in, which you don’t want to lose, you can look at the “In Model” materials after import and go through the effort of identifying and removing the new ones you don’t want… or you can import your DWG into an empty SketchUp file first, delete the materials, and then copy-paste the whole thing into your destination file.

Hopefully, this has been a helpful article to improve your future SketchUp 2019 workflow.

— Liz A.

Tino Leone new Principal at HB&A

We are happy to announce the promotion of Tino Leone to Principal here at HB&A. As a proven and indispensable lead architect for the past 12 years, Tino Leone has designed projects all along Colorado’s Front Range for municipal, private, as well as federal clients.

His architectural designs have been recognized through various award programs including the American Institute of Architects, U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) certification program, the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, and the Enterprise Green Communities Certified Development Award.

Leone joined us in 2007 after working for an architecture firm in Kansas City and with a custom modular home builder in Cañon City, where he currently resides with his wife and three children. His custom home design experience was the perfect foundation for the multi-family housing designs and mixed-use apartment projects that he has designed for us at HB&A.

HB&A Principal Steve Powell expressed his enthusiasm for Leone to join ownership team.

“Tino is tireless in his work for HB&A for the past twelve years. He has led the HB&A team to build up our fire station and housing portfolios. His designs are creative, elegant and functional.”

As a Principal, Tino Leone will be an active leader for both the company and for clients across Colorado. He joins in the HB&A LLC ownership with current principals: Aaron Briggs, Amy Umiamaka, Steve Powell, Mike Richardson, Carrie Higgs, and Andrea Barker. His time will be spent primarily leading design efforts and managing diverse project teams for both renovations and new construction projects.

The future is looking very bright with the leadership and talented professionals that comprise the 25-member team of HB&A professional service providers as 2020 unfolds. HB&A specializes in providing creative, customized planning and design solutions for local and national clients, including municipal, private, and federal projects. View our current work.

Tino Leone, promoted to principal.