Thanks to Thomas and Dirk on their responses. Thomas, your response was helpful in defining that the DEV space (which was configured at installation) needed to be setup. Dirk - the comments by Nachshon finally did the trick. in order to fix this issue, I did the following:
1. Created the DEV space, since it didn't exist but was setup as the di-dev-space. I did this with the XS Client: xs create-space DEV
2. I assigned my user the DEV space and the SpaceManager role using: xs set-space-role tbarber IBC DEV SpaceDeveloper
3. I created a new project, because the old one still wouldn't build. When I created the new project, it completed the build.
Thanks for your help!!!