Four decades in the national record.
When the trade press wrote the history of how design firms hire, CFA kept appearing in it — from ENR and Architectural Record to Interior Design and Progressive Architecture. Excerpts below; originals in the company archive.
The clippings
“More A-Es farm out staff work”
“If we have a crunch with a deadline moved up, we would call on [McFadden’s] services.” — partner, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
Three years after founding, ENR reports CFA has grown 300% in a single year — with one of the world’s most celebrated architecture firms on the record as a client.
“Free-lance employees — the wave of the future?”
“Today, firms can maintain a lean staff in lean times and hire free-lancers when business picks up — and hire people with the particular skills needed for particular jobs.” — David McFadden
Record quotes the founder on the flex-core model — alongside competitors doubting it would catch on. It caught on.
“Part-time Architects” — by David McFadden
“A significant shift has begun to occur in the staffing and hiring practices of design firms… using part-time and project-to-project help has become an integral component of intelligent management.”
P/A hands the founder the pen: a practice column explaining flex staffing to the profession, credited to the president of Consulting for Architects, Inc., founded in 1984.
The founder’s own design work, nationally featured
“A San Francisco shop by David McFadden is a virtuoso demonstration of modernism renewed.”
The Ralph Davies store, San Francisco — a four-page feature. CFA has always been run by people from the boards, not from HR.
The Boston Society of Architects chooses CFA
“The BSA has just brought in the placement firm, Consulting For Architects, to help offices and architects find each other, even if only temporarily.” — Architectural Record, December 1990
After a two-year search, the AIA’s largest chapter partnered with CFA and put the firm inside its own headquarters — The Architects Building, 52 Broad Street. “It’s the right service for architects and for firms and it comes at just the right time,” said BSA President Wilson Pollock FAIA.
CFA/CADD on Record’s twelve-expert CAD panel
“CAD does offer change of unprecedented scale — new ways of creating and visualizing work.” — Richard Price, director, Consulting for Architects/CADD, Inc.
When Architectural Record convened twelve national experts on computers in practice, CFA’s CAD division had a seat at the table — years before most firms owned a workstation.
“Faces of a Downsized Profession”
“We can place you at Richard Meier’s doing a stair detail, at Gensler doing a corporate interior… Portfolios are made more diverse.” — David McFadden
P/A’s landmark feature on the profession’s restructuring names the cities where agency placement has taken root — and profiles a CFA freelancer thriving through placements at firms including Kallmann McKinnell & Wood.
“The World’s First AutoCAD Store” goes online
“We hope the convenience and efficiency of ordering online, either from the Boston store location itself, or from anywhere using the Internet, will bring added value to our customers immediately.” — David C. McFadden, CFA founder and CEO
The trade press covers CFA’s clicks-and-mortar era: the Boston AutoCAD store and CADstoreOnLine.com — capping an award-winning Autodesk training operation that put countless design professionals through its classrooms — many still applying those skills on real projects today.
The doubters from 1988 are footnotes. Project-based placement isn’t “the wave of the future” anymore — it’s simply how the industry works.
The clippings stop in 2001. The work didn’t.
What the trade press caught was the opening act — the training center, the awards, the world’s first AutoCAD store. What it never ran is the bigger story: while the headlines chased the next new thing, CFA stayed heads-down on the one thing it was built for — placing architects and designers, one career at a time. Off and running, rarely looking up. Now, looking back, the record speaks for itself.