Budding architect finds passion through Center for Advanced Professional Studies
A cornerstone of Travis Biggs’ work as manager of the Heber Valley Airport before his departure in March was community outreach. Once residents visit the airport for an event or meet some of the pilots, he said, they gain a greater appreciation for the airport.
So, Biggs started hosting events there — winter parties, culinary festivals and more — as soon as he became manager in 2019. But with community events sometimes bringing in 1,000 visitors, including pilots from out of town, it’s essential to have the facilities to accommodate them.
That’s why Biggs approached Wasatch High School’s Center for Advanced Professional Studies, or CAPS, program last year to see whether students from the engineering and industrial design program might be interested in creating a floor plan for an airport event center.
Recent graduates Lillian Grotegut and Kate Bringhurst took up the charge during their senior year.
Since the building would mostly be seen from a bird’s eye view, they designed it in the shape of a paper airplane, representing the childhood dream of being a pilot becoming reality.
Figuring out the layout involved a lot of trigonometry, Grotegut said, which her trigonometry teacher was “ecstatic” about.
The building includes restrooms, a pay shower, storage and a lounge area with a fireplace and windows facing Mount Timpanogos. The venue would be available to rent out for events.
Grotegut and Bringhurst were mentored by Rob Bouhwis, owner of Provo-based inForm Architecture, who helped the students think through every aspect of the building’s design.
“One of our meetings, we talked for two hours just about insulation. It was really boring, but I learned a lot,” Grotegut said.
The pair’s work culminated in a floor plan layout and to-scale 3D and physical models.
Having graduated last month, the students are off to different corners of the world.
Bringhurst departs on a Latter-day Saint mission in Mexico in the next few months, while Grotegut will start studying architecture at the University of Pécs, a 659-year-old institution in Hungary, in August.
“It’s a very international school, so I’ll be going with people from all over the world. I’ve only found one other American on their school website. Most people are from Turkey and China and Germany,” Grotegut said.
She’s excited to live in a walkable city, learn a little Hungarian and admire all the historic architecture. Her favorite building of all time is the Hungarian Parliament building in Budapest.
“It kind of looks like if a cathedral was a government building,” she said. “It’s neo-Gothic. You’ve got these amazing spires. And the thing with Hungarian architecture is they have the roofing style where they use colored tiles on the roof, so they have patterns.”
The European architecture, she said, will be a marked improvement on Wasatch County’s architecture.
“It’s become a lot more convenient instead of grand, but that’s how it is throughout a lot of the United States,” she said. “I think Heber specifically has done a better job preserving its historical and cultural heritage because it has become more of a tourist destination. So, it’s kind of emphasizing (its Swiss influence). … You’ll see the Midway Town Hall or the Heber Town Hall. They’re really beautiful buildings.”
A true Heberite, Grotegut’s dream project would be to design a train station. She hopes to one day be a principal architect at her own firm.
“I think (my) long-term goal would be to be able to travel internationally and be able to design buildings for places all over the world and, while doing that, be able to learn about the cultures of many different places and different peoples,” she said.
Grotegut gained her passion through her Architecture I and II courses at Wasatch High School, then at the Center for Advanced Professional Studies. Her first architecture project was designing the floor plan for a home to be built by students of the school’s homebuilding course.
“CAPS does so many different projects. It could be something like an automatic pheasant feeder or making toys for visually impaired students or designing a building. So, I decided it would be a cool thing to try out, and during that process with the first project, I kind of fell in love with it,” she said.
Architecture, she said, influences the way people interact with a space and with each other. That philosophy informed the way she designed the airport’s event center.
“You can tell by listening to her,” Biggs said. “It’s not just, ‘We’re just doing this and picking colors and picking materials.’ It’s like, ‘What are we going for overall? What’s the feel? What’s the intention of this building? How do we want it to influence the community?’ You don’t hear a lot of high school kids thinking like that.”
Though Biggs is no longer airport manager, and Grotegut is off to Hungary, both want to be involved in the project’s future. Grotegut will pitch it to the next year’s Center for Advanced Professional Studies students, who will work out funding and engineering and design a parking lot and airplane camp, which would be like an RV camp for planes flown in by out-of-towners.
Once those aspects are worked out, Biggs said the airport plans to approach the Heber City planning department to make the paper airplane-shaped dream a reality.
The original article published by the Park Record can be found here.
