BTGA is organized in a client-centered studio structure.  Ms. Thornton is in charge of institutional practice, and serves as the Principal-in–Charge for most institutional projects.  She will ensure that philosophical consistency and important client priorities are implemented faithfully throughout the process.  Mr. Ginsburg focuses on educational renovations with special skills in scheduling – both project and staffing. He manages the project team workloads.  They are supported by a project architect/job captain, BTGA staff, and a professional design team of consultants.

In particular, BTGA's design team has:

• Recent and extensive experience with adaptive reuse of historic buildings.
• Experience as designers and facilitators of user group consensus-building workshops. Ms. Thornton designed and led the user workshops at Brown University with 30 stakeholders that resulted in the Smith-Buonanno Hall schematic design.  In such a scenario, exercises establish the group’s design priorities. BTGA then generates several alternate design solutions which are discussed, pro and con, by the group. With those comments, the design is refined until the entire group can support the solution. The benefits of this approach include a large group of stakeholders that understand the tradeoffs and can explain and support the solution to their peers.
• Recent success with phased relocations of office staff during occupied renovations.
• Effective administrative tracking systems. All meetings with BTGA are well documented, and the minutes shared in a timely basis via email distribution.  We view facilitating good communication as one of our primary responsibilities on the project team.
• Excellent schedule responsiveness.
• A clear structure of responsibility and communication.
• A reputation for accurate, clear working documents.

Cost Control

True respect for the client’s budget is an important part of developing a good client relationship, and is integral to BTGA’s service philosophy.  We maintain an excellent cost control record. We utilize professional estimators for our traditional bid format institutional projects, but also have experience working as part of a construction management team from the very earliest stages of the project.

As an example of a difficult but successful cost control effort, we offer a recent large institutional project – in 2001, BTGA was retained by the Providence Housing Authority to design their new Hartford Park Community Center with a budget of $4.3 million.  Due to Federal funding cutbacks, the project was threatened with cancellation.  Based on a previous professional estimate by our consultant, BTGA worked with the Authority to evaluate cost options of various reduced scope and phasing schemes. All revised budgeting work was done in-house by Ms. Thornton. We also provided the client with different package pricing to assist in grant applications. The Authority elected to proceed with the building in two phases, with BTGA completing sets of construction documents for both the office/classroom wing and the second phase gymnasium at the same time to ensure coordinated design.  Phase 1 (offices, computer classrooms, and food court mini-atrium) was put to competitive low bid in 2003, and a contract was signed for $2,340,000 – well within the projected budget of $2,507,530.  Completed in 2004, final construction cost, including weather delays and materials price escalation, equaled $2,541,390; just 1.4% over BTGA’s projected budget.  Phase 2 (gymnasium) is budgeted at $1.8M and is awaiting funding.

More information on these and other projects is included in our Projects section.