Architectural design: Distinctive design marks work of architectural firm
Company has $55 million in Flathead Valley projects
Only in Montana could two friends’ blissful day of fishing and sipping sour mash along a stream bank morph seven decades later into a multimillion-dollar national architectural and engineering concern — and not lose that focus on fun.
Today, CTA Architects Engineers is the design force behind some of the Flathead’s most distinctive public buildings.
With a $55 million local construction tab last year and $400 million nationally in 2006, that force is being felt widely.
Headquartered in Billings, CTA is the preferred architectural firm for Dell computers and Whole Foods Markets. With a select list of international clients, they have worked in Ireland.
CTA designed the shooting-sports venue for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, a serendipitous turn of events. The firm’s CEO had been a shooter for the military 30 years earlier, and his expertise played into the design job. Today, CTA has designed three of the four shooting venues in the United States.
The firm has experienced 15 percent growth a year in both employees and volume for several years now, said David Mitchell, Kalispell office manager and a principal with the firm.
Mitchell and Corey Johnson, an architect and associate with the firm, were two of the five corporate employees seeded into the Kalispell CTA office when it opened in the second floor of the First Interstate Bank building in 2001.
That was just after CTA landed the contract to help School District 5 design and promote the new Glacier High School. A public vote approved the project in 2004; the doors of the new school will open this fall.
Ground-breaking design work displayed at Glacier High School and at other local CTA projects — First Interstate Bank buildings in Whitefish and Kalispell, The Lodge at Whitefish Lake, The Blue Cow in Kalispell, even the new Sportsman & Ski Haus store going up at Hutton Ranch Plaza — doesn’t just happen.
There’s always a story behind the design, Mitchell said. Design characteristics are drawn from the client’s culture, purpose in the community and employees’ needs, among other factors.
“A building becomes more than just a place to house their business,” he said. “It becomes a statement of who they are.”
CTA’s corporate culture of suiting a building to a client’s way of working, caring for the natural environment, nurturing employees, unflinchingly supporting their professional passion, and more, all foster successful and striking finished projects.
Last September, the Zweig White management consulting and research firm named CTA one of the top 25 architectural firms in the nation for which to work.
“They recruited me straight out of college,” Johnson said of his 16 years with the firm, “and I haven’t turned my head since.”
That day in 1938 along the Boulder River, when Ralph Cushing, a structural engineer, and Everett Terrell, an architect, decided to leave their employer and forge a partnership of their own was ground-breaking for its time.
Even now, the combination of engineering and architectural forces under one roof is less the rule than the exception. CTA has expanded its multidisciplinary approach to offer 24 building-related fields in the firm.
With architects, interior designers, landscape architects, civil engineers, business development specialists, mechanical engineers, computer-assisted design technicians, electrical engineers, graphics specialists, refrigeration designers, land planners and others all creating side-by-side in the same office suite, solutions flow naturally.
“Coordination is great,” Johnson said. “You just don’t get that collaboration when you work” on a contract basis with outside firms.
“There are no communication problems,” Mitchell said. “We solve problems at the watercooler,” where colleagues in different disciplines talk over projects and turn snags into solutions.
Clients win when their questions have been anticipated and are answered in the first session or two.
“The more information, the better our bids look on paper,” Johnson said.
Environmental consciousness is a particular emphasis.
In 2004, the Billings corporate headquarters was relocated in an old warehouse in the core of the city. Already developed but decaying property was recycled with the redesign, a green-plantings roof was established, runoff water is captured and reused, atmospheric
carbon dioxide is exchanged for oxygen. Instead of paving over even more undeveloped land, an existing building was given another 100-year life span.
CTA designs with environmentally conscious materials in mind, installing low-flow plumbing and incorporating bio-fueled heating systems.
The firm encourages clients to locate in the hearts of their cities, to become a part of the economic health of their communities. The closer they locate to city centers, the fewer greenhouse gases employees produce driving to other businesses.
At CTA, each professional has an area of expertise.
In Kalispell, Mitchell is the specialist in high-end residential, financial institutions and resort work. Johnson is the schools specialist, with five or six schools on the boards now. Likewise, each of the 14 people now in the Kalispell office has an area of expertise.
It results in a wide range of projects throughout the region and the nation.
“The reason we have grown and have done these things is we’re passionate about design and engineering,” Johnson said.
“Our priority is people. If you can be really compassionate and ambitious about what you do on your clients’ side instead of your own side,” you will be successful.
