HB&A architectural firm has evolved into a majority woman-owned small business over the past 50 years.

Amy Umiamaka, like many young girls, played with Barbies as a child. But she worried more about shelter for her Barbies than about their fashion style. “I made houses for the Barbies out of Legos and stuff like that,” she says.

It was perhaps an early sign of her future career as an architect; an architectural drafting class in high school sealed the deal.

“It was like solving a puzzle,” she says. “The whole thought of envisioning something and having it in your head, and then drawing it and then watching someone build it and seeing what you had in your head become reality.”

She’s seen a lot of projects become reality over nearly 30 years with HB&A Architecture & Planning in Colorado Springs. And she’s seen lots of changes; for one, when she joined the business in 1993, she was the first woman to be hired on the technical side as an architect. Now the company, as of 2020, is a majority woman-owned small business.

Umiamaka is part of the ownership group; so is Andrea Barker, who started at HB&A a year before Umiamaka but was hired to do marketing — though she does have a master’s in architecture. Barker is now director of business development.

Women principals and partners at architectural firms quadrupled from 4% in 1999 to 16% in 2005, according to the American Institute of Architects. In 1958, only 1% of registered architects were women; the group says. The field is still dominated by men, but that figure has grown to 17%.

Another change: technology. When Umiamaka joined the company, it was in the early days of computer-aided design, or CAD; in school, she had done everything by hand for the most part.

There was no network in those early days, she says. “Everything was stored on individual computers.”

In more recent years, HB&A, which now has 27 employees, added geospatial technologies to its toolbox, using GIS (geographic information system) mapping and computer modeling. The technology has transformed mapping; HB&A uses it, as its website states, “to refine and augment existing maps and geographical information, in order to analyze data and provide solid recommendations.”

“If you can put your finger on a point in a place,” Barker says, the technology pulls all the information related to that one point together.

The beginnings

HB&A, initially named Higginbotham and Associates, was started in 1971 by Don Higginbotham. It became Higginbotham, Briggs & Associates in 1991 and HB&A LLC in 2001. While the company marked its first half-century last year, it waited until this year to celebrate that 50th anniversary because of the pandemic.

Higginbotham died in 2020 at age 90; he was transitioning out of the business when Barker and Umiamaka came aboard, Barker says.

But his influence was still felt.

Higginbotham served in the Air Force, Barker said, “so military has been a piece of who we serve for a long time. ... When I joined the company in ’92, we were heavily, heavily into the military master planning world, and architecture was in support of that.”

Starting in the ‘90s, though, the pendulum began to swing the other way and architecture “really started gaining ground,” Barker says, transitioning from largely a support element to a more central part of the business.

Military still is key to HB&A’S portfolio, though; a map in the conference room points to projects across the globe where HB&A has been involved. Local military projects have ranged from work on the Cheyenne Mountain Integrated Command Center to the Air Force Academy Ropes Course and Climbing Wall.

HB&A is “heavily into municipal government design as well,” Barker notes. Fire stations have become a particular niche; HB&A, for example, was the design team behind the renovation and remodel of Fire Station 1 in downtown Colorado Springs. Among other firehouse projects, it’s working with Colorado Springs and Pueblo West fire departments on the design and construction of several new fire stations.

HB&A was also chosen for an ongoing project to modernize the Colorado Springs Airport — a project that became a trial by fire, or at least a trial after fire. Just weeks after HB&A was picked for the job, a rooftop fire in April 2018 and the resulting smoke and water damage impacted all three floors of the airport; repairs and upgrades would need to be made at the same time.

Before the fire, recalls Greg Phillips, the airport’s aviation director, “we were in no hurry; let’s think this through, then start bit by bit. And then the fire happened and that changed everything. We went from not needing design services to needing them, like, yesterday. So HB&A jumped right in. They started designing while we were doing demo and trying to move everything that had been damaged in the fire. ... Designers were designing a section while the contractor was standing right behind them so they could start work.”

It was the “public side” of the airport away from the concourse — areas such as ticketing and baggage claim — that was damaged; those repairs and upgrades took about 2 ½ years to complete, Phillips said. HB&A, he says, did “a phenomenal job” and is now working on the new design for the concourse; that work could begin next spring, Phillips said, and will be done in stages.

Barker looks to HB&A to continue to diversify, including in the private sector. She points to HB&A’S work with Darsey Nicklasson’s DHN Planning and Development as an example of its efforts in that area; HB&A has done the design for DHN’S projects, including trendy, urban Blue Dot Place and Casa Mundi apartments in downtown Colorado Springs and Mosaica and Kaleidos, more family-oriented apartment projects; Blue Dot Place, which opened in early 2016, was at the forefront of a wave of apartment projects downtown.

Among other reasons, Nicklasson said she chose HB&A because it’s a local company invested in the community.

“They’re very good at their job. ... They’re thoughtful, not just in design, but in construction, how things are put together. ... It’s just a really solid company and a really smart group of people to work with.”

Barker credits HB&A’S success “to really being oriented about the people and who is this organization that needs this building and why. ... We check our ego at the door and sit and really, really listen to what the client needs.”