Cultural + Civic

Setting the scene

MCA enhances the quality and strength of our cultural and civic life by providing professional services to Museums, State and Municipal Governments, Church Organizations and a variety of community-based and nonprofit organizations. As always, our corporate cultural ethos is paramount – Do the Right Thing. For institutions working within often tight budget constraints while delivering first-class experiences and service to our communities, nothing less is acceptable. We have been privileged to associate with some inspiring organizations and leverage our experience and expertise in helping them to meet and exceed their expectations.

Museums + Exhibition

MCA was formed to serve the needs of large institutional clients, and we have been honored to work with several world-class museum institutions in providing the wide range of services required by this specialized client type. Our projects for museum institutions range from “maintenance and repair” design to highly specialized gallery upgrade work to large capital projects. Regardless of project scale and type, we service all with equal attention to the basics – program appropriateness, budget, schedule and superior design that is responsive to the institutional mission. Our professionals work as a team with Museum Directors and their staff, and on occasion have even worked directly with renowned artists on occasions where their artwork has been directly integrated into the fabric of the building. Our professional staff remain involved in the museum community through membership in museum organizations, attendance at conferences and through museum volunteer work. We have built strong relationships with strategic specialty consultants in museum-specific specialties from lighting and display design to specialized mechanical and electrical systems systems expertise. Our professional services range from whole-facility building and envelope assessments and repair/replacement design, through master-planning, programming fund-raising support and our full range of design services. We have worked with our museum clients through long term indefinite delivery/on-call/IDIQ contract arrangements and delivered projects through design/bid/build and with CM at Risk teams.

Harvard University – Dumbarton Oaks Gallery Upgrades

Civic Facilities - State & Local Governmental Agencies

State and Local Governments have the same complex needs as any large institutional clients that own, occupy and maintain a large and diverse portfolio of real estate and physical plant assets. In addition, they are often subject to stringent and occasionally unpredictable funding environments. Sometimes rigidly prescribed procurement requirements designed to foster competition can occasionally make it difficult to always obtain best value or current best practice results. And their work is always subject to larger amounts of public scrutiny, comment and revision as compared to other institutional clients. MCA has served our Civic clients successfully since our founding – from citywide Space Utilization Master Plans to the repair, renovation, re-use and replacement of aging buildings. We have designed projects from new courts buildings to the adaptive re-use of historic public buildings. We work on individual capital projects and under long-term IDIQ contracts. It turns out that our corporate mindset towards serving large institutional organizations lends itself very successfully to the needs of our our civic clients. And the wide array of project-types and service sectors that MCA is involved in allow us to offer the experience necessary to serve the wide variety of facilities needs required by our civic clients.

Religious Centers

Religious Institutions and their spaces for worship, fellowship and education form an integral part of our communities. Our staff includes individuals trained in both ministry and church master planning, as well as individuals who have served on institutional boards administering the operation of religious facilities. This background provides a depth of perspective and experience which enable MCA to provide design and planning services to support a wide variety of religious institution design needs, on projects ranging from day to day repairs, maintenance, stabilization and preservation to the initial conceptual planning, programming and design of new facilities. Our expertise in related facilities sectors, such as experience in historic renovation and restoration and school design, provide and even deeper bench of skill sets available to assist religious organizations in meeting their facilities needs economically and effectively.