The founders of Salt Lake City-based CRSA, Wally Cooper and Allen Roberts, are now retired from the architectural firm they established more than 45 years ago, but their legacy lives on as the second generation of leadership celebrates some of the firm’s greatest successes.

Now led by President Ben Rogers, three additional managing principals and a broader leadership team, the firm has grown to a staff of nearly 60, seeing its annual revenue increase to more than $21 million in 2020, nearly 15% above 2019.

最初推出关注历史提出rvation, Cooper/Roberts Architecture built a strong reputation from its work on restoration projects, using that experience to break into the cultural, higher education and civic markets CRSA still is known for today. The addition of Soren Simonsen as a partner in 2000 resulted in a firm name change to CRSA and brought landscape architecture to the firm’s established services of architecture, interior design and planning.

CRSA has taken advantage of the tremendous growth across Utah and the Intermountain West to break into newer, developer-led markets like the multifamily and mixed-use sectors as well as office and workplace strategy design.

“We had a great year last year; the best we’ve ever had,” Rogers says.

NOSTALGIC COMPONENTSCRSA新盐湖城总部的设计结合了大理石口音，以庆祝和保留犹他州历史悠久的沃克中心的原始设计功能。
Image courtesy of CRSA

Purposeful Transition

The firm’s transition to its second generation of leadership is still a work in progress that started with the founders fully stepping back from the firm in 2018 and Rogers being named president, says Laura Reid, chief financial officer and director of human resources for the firm. She says they’ve been managing it well, and profitably, but that “we still have some transition to go.”

罗杰斯说，新的领导团队的愿景包括一个目标“与创始人不同”。领导团队带来了顾问，以帮助他们提高公司标准，生产力和盈利能力。罗杰斯说：“该公司建立了一项利润分担计划，这有助于激励我们的员工，高级校长和经理。”

At the beginning of 2020, the firm was starting to realize several milestones that represented this transition, such as moving out of their space in the building owned by their founders to a headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City, creating a new home on the internet with a complete webpage overhaul and formalizing a market sector for workplace strategy consulting.

AMPLE SPACECRSA’s new workspace allows the firm to showcase its designs for innovative offices that incorporate the latest workplace strategies.
Image courtesy of CRSA

Though COVID-19 left some firms in the AEC industry scrambling to adjust to remote work, CRSA’s efforts to improve productivity included the foresight to explore web-based desktop and server solutions. In the fall of 2019, as the firm began designing its new office, leaders conducted an analysis that included a cost-per-station comparison against a fully cloud-based system. The research showed the cloud was not only a viable option to reduce upfront hardware costs but also provided more flexibility for staff in various life situations, whether they were working in the headquarters or in CRSA’s St. George, Utah, office or traveling across the Mountain West for project-related work.

罗杰斯说：“到2020年初，我们正处于需要决定是否要解决这个问题的时刻。”他说：“但是我们处于一个很好的位置，我们已经设置了我们的服务器，我们所要做的就是设置远程工作站，我们能够基本上工作相同就像我们在办公室一样。”

Both Rogers and Reid say they saw no negative impacts to productivity from working in the cloud. “We didn’t really have issues at all, and our metrics actually went up,” Reid adds.

HISTORIC CARERestoration of Davis County Memorial Courthouse will demolish previous additions and reestablish the interior to its 1932 appearance.
Image courtesy of CRSA

Avenues to a New Service

Having an effective and adaptable workplace strategy is critical for many businesses in Utah due to the area’s extensive growth and high competition for talent. COVID has forced many organizations to review their real estate assets, costs and mobility needs after a year of remote work.

其中包括犹他州，最近开始寻找更好地利用其现有和计划中的空间的方法。The state turned to CRSA, which partnered with Emergent Solutions Organizational Design Labs (ESODL) to complete a space utilization study of 2.6 million sq ft of state office space in 2018. The study aimed to help the state’s Dept. of Facilities and Construction Management (DFCM) understand “how it could more efficiently use its real estate resources,” says Kathy Wheadon, managing principal for the higher education market at CRSA and a specialist in workplace strategy.

FLEXIBILITYDesign of the Taylorsville State Office Building allowed CRSA to implement new design standards for the workplace, including more employee mobility for dozens of state departments.
Image courtesy of CRSA

was also during the time when DFCM needed to shift nearly 700 employees from the 60-year-old, soon-to-be-demolished State Office Building to a nearby campus it had purchased from American Express.

Wheadon says all sorts of organizations, whether private or public, are interested in employee recruitment and retention, and she gets excited about “the component piece of architecture, which is creating a great workspace where people want to come to work and that makes them more productive,” she says.

惠顿说，这项研究结果表明，国家员工新利luck“想在那里，他们想做出色的工作，他们想与队友合作，他们真的想提供出色的服务。”

She adds, “You get a lot out of your employees when they’re happy.”

惠顿（Whewon）将公司在研究中的工作归功于与该州签订的其他合同，以更新其太新利luck空标准，并以超过40万平方英尺的空间进行设计。她指出，这项努力也是一个机会，可以通过包括农村犹他州的机会来提高劳动力股权。

“机动性是一个巨大的驱动力，”沃登说。“移动性不仅是派人在家工作，而且还要考虑谁进入办公室以及如何支持他们。她说，他们需要员工，需要创新和创造性的员工队伍。”她强调，拥有满足这些需求的空间的重要性。

连接CRSA assisted in developing the architectural design guide for the Washington, D.C., LDS temple. Multiple precedents and design solutions were tested to better connect the interior and exterior character of the building.
图像由耶稣基督后期圣徒教会

Traditional Markets Steady

尽管该公司在工作场所战略和其他新开发商领导的市场的经验正在增长和发展，但其更传统的项目类型的前景也是看涨的。罗杰斯说，这部分归因于市场，这也是由于该公司在提供服务和设计方面的声誉。

A long-term client who agrees is Chris Robbins, senior project manager with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robbins was first exposed to CRSA earlier in his career as a consultant, before he came to work managing special projects for the LDS. “I was impressed from their early days by the founders,” he says, adding that he is currently working with the firm on three projects, all of which involve historic remodels and renovations.

其中包括全面的改建和多年历史修复，安排了100,000平方英尺以上，计划于今年晚些时候在曼蒂庙（Manti Temple）于1888年在犹他州曼蒂（Manti）建造的曼蒂神庙（Manti Temple）。对于210,000平方英尺的圣乔治神庙，最古老的LDS神庙，最初于1877年献身。

国际范围CRSA为墨西哥蒂华纳的33,000平方英尺的寺庙提供了建筑和规划，为耶稣基督的圣徒教会提供了建筑和规划。
图像由耶稣基督后期圣徒教会

“They’re great collaborators,” says Robbins. “They know how to staff the team right,” especially for the challenging kinds of historical renovation projects he manages. Robbins adds that unforeseen conditions or the lack of as-builts are typical challenges they encounter when trying to upgrade facilities while maintaining their historical integrity.

“The kind of work we do, it takes a lot of interaction, creative thinking, solution-oriented solving, plus good architecture,” he says. “Both [CRSA’s] St. George and Salt Lake City offices have been very collaborative on their approach to these challenges.”

The firm’s leadership concurs with Robbins that the firm is capable of bringing diverse perspectives and areas of expertise together in a collaborative manner to get the work done. These differences among members of the CRSA team “are one of the things that makes us great,” says Reid.

“我爱每天上班,”Wheadon说,the most-tenured of the firm’s managing principals. “I think I’m surrounded by the most brilliant, hard-working, invested, creative folks, and I find the greatest pleasure when I can sit back and let them shine.”