Friday5 – July 17, 2026

The new 13,000-square-foot, two-story Education and Visitors Center sits next to the historic 16th Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham’s Civil Rights District, giving the congregation its first dedicated space to receive visitors. The church was founded in 1873 and is the site of the September 15, 1963 bombing that helped push forward the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The building adds meeting rooms, a dining area, a commercial kitchen and support space so the active church can host school tours, exhibits and public programming, with a design that pays homage to the three single-family homes originally on site.

For this project, MillerClapperton is fabricating and installing 3,300 square feet of Fiber Cement panels, contributing to a clean, contemporary exterior that complements the historic church next door.

This week’s topic certainly did.

For the past few months, we’ve been working through a subcontract issue on a project.

It wasn’t a major dispute. There were no significant disagreements over money, scope, schedule, or contract terms. In fact, many of the revisions we proposed had already been accepted on previous projects.

One of our comments wasn’t even a point of negotiation. It simply noted that part of the Scope of Work exhibit had been written for an entirely different trade.

By all accounts, it should have been a straightforward conversation.

Read the rest in Conversations with Zane by clicking the link below.

Hosted by: Aaron Prinz

In this episode of the DESIGN:ED podcast, architect Moshie Safdie and Rod Bigelow, executive director of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, discuss the museum’s upcoming expansion and the long-term vision for its campus as a premier art destination in the United States.