VCBO Architecture Celebrates 50 Years

This year, VCBO Architecture reached an important milestone – 50 years in business. Since the one-man Valentiner and Associates was established in 1973, the firm has grown into a top architecture firm in the Intermountain West, with 15 current principals and over 100 employees in Salt Lake City and St. George, Utah; and Laie, Hawaii.?

Since its founding, VCBO has strived not only to craft beautiful, cutting-edge spaces but to design with people in mind – to reflect the end users’ needs and values in both form and function and to maximize community impact.

This determination is reflected in our commitment to social responsibility, putting into action ideals of diversity, equity, inclusion, sustainability, and community service. To mark our 50-year milestone and reiterate our core mission, VCBO reimagined its brand identity this year, centered around the mantra: for people to thrive.

Newly reaffirmed, VCBO has been working for half a century to design buildings that enhance the lives of their inhabitants. While our projects number far higher than those represented here, VCBO is proud to celebrate some of our historic and impactful projects as we reflect on how the firm has grown and learned over the years.

One Utah Center

Standing at the intersection of Main Street and 200 South, One Utah Center commands pride of place in Salt Lake’s central business district. Clad in a checkerboard of “sunset red” and gray granite and capped with a bronze pyramid, it’s an icon of the skyline. One of VCBO’s most significant contributions to the architectural landscape of Salt Lake City.

At 458 feet and 9 inches tall, the 24-story building was Salt Lake’s tallest private office building when it was completed in 1992. However, its significance to the city’s urban fabric came from its location as much as its height. Anchoring the northwest corner of Salt Lake’s Block 57, One Utah Center represented the keystone of a plan to revitalize and reconnect the city’s downtown core.?

Developing Block 57 presented a daunting challenge in the mid-1980s. Once a chic district, by 1983 the block’s most notable tenants were dusky pawn shops and an X-rated movie theater. The block had become a blight at the heart of downtown, its empty storefronts and vacant lots a hole at the heart of the city.?

“It was not just designing the building,” Valentiner explains. “It was the sidewalk, the plaza beside it, and the parking structure below. We worked with the city for a long time to develop the overall plan that could accommodate future buildings and the plaza.”

Conceived by local developer Roger Boyer of the Boyer Corporation, the One Utah Center project—including the surrounding public plaza that would later become the Gallivan Center—would transform the block, weaving together the north and south ends of downtown and creating a vibrant “living room” in the center of the city.?

Designed by Niels Valentiner and led by architect Sean Onyon—who was just 33 years old at the time—the design teamr was tasked with integrating the new building into the historical brick and stone vernacular of Salt Lake’s downtown core. Valentiner and the VCBO team chose a building that harmonizes with the traditional rooflines and cornices of the neighboring structures—a major contrast to the international style “glass box” buildings that were popular at the time.?

“We didn’t want to come in with a hard-edged, high-tech office building,” Niels Valentiner told the Salt Lake Tribune in May of 1990. “We felt a great sensitivity that we had to be careful about the fabric of downtown ... that we have a building that can fit into the environment and that others can build on.”

One Utah Center’s postmodern design thus combines traditional motifs on the granite facade with the modern functionality of a glass-clad core. Classically inspired pediments cap each face of the building with distinctive round windows that evoke Phillip Johnson’s Chippendale Building in New York City. These features contribute to the distinctive roofline of the building, which is topped by an iconic copper-clad pyramid. Gleaming in the morning sun or lit up at night, the pyramid has helped make One Utah Center an icon of the Salt Lake skyline.?

“For us as a city, this opens a new era,” Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer DePaulis declared at a ceremony celebrating the “topping” of One Utah Center in the spring of 1990. Thirty years later, One Utah Center endures as an indelible piece of the urban fabric of downtown Salt Lake City.

Utah Olympic Park

The 2002 Winter Olympic Games were a seminal moment in Utah’s history: a celebration of winter sports that elevated Salt Lake City and the natural beauty of the Wasatch Mountains onto the world stage. Beyond the two-week competition, the Games also provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to develop world-class winter-sports infrastructure and establish the region as a world-class athletic training center.

As a member of the organizing committee that led the city’s bids for the 1998 Games (ultimately hosted by Nagano, Japan) and the 2002 Games, Niels Valentiner and the VCBO team helped develop the initial site plans and facility designs that would win Salt Lake City the honor of hosting the Winter Olympics. For more than a decade, VCBO supported the effort to bring the games to Utah, and the firm was there in Budapest in June 1995 when the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2002 Games to Salt Lake City.

VCBO would go on to design more than a dozen buildings for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games—including venues for hockey, biathlon, ski jumping, bobsled and luge, and speed skating. The firm also designed the Games’ ice hockey event center in West Valley City—what today is the Maverik Center.

Utah State Capitol Restoration

When the Utah State Capitol was completed in 1916—just 20 years into Utah’s statehood—it embodied the pride and ambitions of the 45th state and epitomized the tradition of neoclassical government buildings that have come to symbolize American democracy.

Designed by Richard K. A. Kletting—a German-born architect well known in Utah for his designs for the original Salt Palace and Saltair—the Utah State Capitol was an advanced building for its time. By the turn of the century, however, concerns for the historic building’s deteriorating condition, and particularly its ability to withstand a seismic event, led the state to undertake a complete restoration.

The project was so intense, that—despite having offices fewer than two and a half miles from the project site—VCBO operated a dedicated office at the capitol for five years.

“We took an entire team, and we moved out of this building,” remembers lead architect Sean Onyon. “It worked well for us because, in being a very gnarly remodel and historic restoration, we were constantly walking back into the capitol to check something.” Under the direction of the Capitol Preservation Board, the $200 million restoration would enhance the safety of the building, improve its efficiency and function, and preserve its historic integrity.

Restoring and preserving the Capitol’s historic glory was a painstaking process of recreating—and in some cases completing—Kletting’s original vision. Public galleries were returned to their original sizes, rooms repainted to their original colors, and murals and artworks restored. New carpets matching the 1916 originals were commissioned and installed. Original pieces of furniture were restored or replaced with period pieces. And on the Capitol grounds, the architects successfully combined Kletting’s original site plan with Olmstead’s uncompleted vision for an elliptical walkway into a holistic landscaping design.

“Our objective,” remembers Brent Tippets, “was that when we walked out the door to have everybody say, ‘What did you do?’ It wasn’t that we wanted to change the aesthetic—we wanted to enhance what was there.”

Restoring the capitol didn’t just mean reaching back into the past, however; VCBO also had to prepare for the future. In collaboration with David Hart, Architect of the Capitol and executive director of the Capitol Preservation Board, VCBO documented everything related to the project.

“David realized that all of this work was essentially for the next hundred years,” says Onyon. “We were thinking in big-picture terms that, a hundred years from now, somebody is going to need to fix it all up again and make sure it stands for the next hundred years. This project was really a legacy.”

The capitol was rededicated on January 4, 2008. “This renovation of the Utah State Capitol,” said Wilson Martin, Utah State Historic Preservation Officer, “with its scope, vision, commitment, and authenticity, will distinguish it as one of the most significant projects that has ever been done in the United States.”

Rome Italy Temple

Through the beginning of the 21st century, VCBO designed several international temples for the Church, including in El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico City. Yet, important as those projects were, the significance of Rome in Christian history and tradition gave this project special meaning.

Simply being named to the Rome Temple project was an exciting moment for the VCBO team. In an unexpected phone call shortly after the project’s announcement, the Church asked Niels Valentiner to accept the role of lead architect for the project. “We were flying like kites for a few days before we came down off the ceiling,” Valentiner says.

Valentiner anchored the design of the temple in three guiding principles: that it harmonize with contemporary Italian design, that it reflect the great tradition of Italian religious and civic architecture, and that it be recognizable as a temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

From the beginning, it was clear to Valentiner that reconciling these distinct traditions would require a unique design solution. “We weren’t going to imitate or copy Roman architecture,” he says. Building a temple in Rome, however, would call for an Italian inflection to the Church’s traditional architectural vernacular. So the team set out to pay homage to Italian design while creating something new.

“Italy is known around the world for beautiful design,” Valentiner says. “Italian cars, Italian clothes, Italian architecture … We wanted to incorporate these traditions of Italian design, while clearly designing for purpose as a temple.”

For the site plan, Valentiner reimagined the classic Italian piazza. Referencing Michaelagelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio on Capitoline Hill, the complex’s four main buildings—the temple, patron housing, visitors’ center, and chapel—frame a multilevel plaza in which beautiful stone-covered planter boxes, travertine pavers, and 500-year-old olive trees provide space for quiet contemplation by temple patrons and visitors.

The olive trees—part of an ancient grove that once occupied the site—also inspired the temple’s distinctive stained-glass windows. All around the building and on the temple’s two spires, 804 panels made up of over 60,000 individual panes form a continuous composition in which olive leaves connect earth and sky. Rich in scriptural symbolism and Italian heritage, the mosaic was drawn by VCBO architect P. J. Woods and crafted by Salt Lake glass artisan Tom Holdman.

On March 10, 2019—more than 10 years after that first surprising phone call—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicated the Rome Italy Temple. Today it stands as VCBO’s most important work for the Church, and a project of special meaning for the firm.

Here's To the Next 50

As we celebrate this year and the partners, clients, and contractors who have made our success possible, perhaps no one can state VCBO’s vision for the future as well as its founder, Niels Valentiner:

“The process of creative architecture—of transforming a blank piece of paper into a living piece of the built environment—has been a consistent challenge for me. But its rewards have been a personal journey of discovery. As VCBO looks ahead to its next 50 years, it’s my hope that we will continue this legacy of architectural collaboration: sculpting new creations with functional and aesthetically pleasing design that has meaning to our clients, ourselves, and the many people and communities who experience the work for years to come.”