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November 18, 2013

Lord Aeck Sargent Celebrates New D.C. Area Office, Visual Identity System, Growth, Expansion and Ongoing Commitment to Provide “Responsive Design”

ATLANTA, Nov. 18, 2013 – Employees of Lord Aeck Sargent (LAS) today gathered to celebrate here and in the firm’s offices around the country. The architecture, design and planning firm made several major announcements, including the opening of its metro Washington, D.C. office – its sixth, and its second new office this year. The firm also introduced a new visual identity system that reinforces its core mission to provide Responsive Design to its clients throughout the country.

The firm’s updated visual identity system and website were unveiled to employees this morning by Joe Greco, Lord Aeck Sargent president, coinciding with the firm’s announcement of geographic expansion and its recent offering of greater planning services to clients.

“At the same time,” Greco emphasized, “There is one thing that hasn’t and will not change, and that is our commitment to provide Responsive Design. Our firm prides itself on responding creatively to each project’s every detail and unique design challenges.”

Post-recession growth and expansion
“With the exception of 2010 and 2011, when we and most of our peers in the industry experienced the effects of the Great Recession, the firm has pretty much been steadily growing since 1998,” Greco said. “In late 2011, early 2012, requests for our services began to pick back up, with revenues up by 7.5 percent in 2012. And with 2013 coming to a close, we’re anticipating another revenue increase of more than 16 percent, through a combination of organic growth and acquisition.

“We began 2012 with 115 employees, and we expect to have close to 150 by this year end,” Greco noted.

“Our April merger with Urban Collage greatly expanded our urban design and planning practice, complementing our science, historic preservation, education, arts/culture and housing/mixed-use practice areas. With that merger, we also added an office in Lexington, Kentucky. And with the new office we’ve just opened in the D.C. area, we are well on the way to executing the five-year strategic plan we developed in 2012.”

Will Brownback heads Washington, D.C. office
In Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, about 14 miles from the District, LAS has opened its new office and brought on William “Will” Brownback as a principal to lead it. Brownback, who has more than 30 years of architectural experience, most recently served as principal-in-charge of The Preston Partnership’s Washington, D.C. branch office, which he started in 2004.

“The D.C. market is robust and offers excellent opportunities in all of our practice areas,” said Tony Aeck, LAS chairman. “And we’re not a total stranger to the area, as we’ve successfully completed numerous historic preservation, science and education projects in both Maryland and Virginia. Now we’re bringing our reputation for Responsive Design on technically complex projects more directly to our clients in the Mid-Atlantic region.

“Initially our D.C. office will focus significantly on Will’s chief area of expertise, which is the planning and designing of multi-family housing and mixed-use projects,” Aeck continued. “However, we expect to bring all of our practice area expertise to bear fairly quickly, and to better serve clients with whom we are already working in this area. We’re excited to have someone with Will’s experience and business acumen at the helm of the office.”

“I have a passion for helping to create innovative multi-family housing,” Brownback said. While the market for multi-family housing has rebounded since the downturn across most of the nation, the D.C. area is particularly strong. So I’m really excited about being able to bring the design quality of Lord Aeck Sargent to our clients in this part of the country.”

New visual identity system and social media sites
The new visual identity system for Lord Aeck Sargent employs a vertically oriented sans-serif typeface of the company name and a graphic mark of abstracted “pillars” derived from the company’s mission to provide Responsive Design. The pillars and font “respond” to the unique conditions of a particular graphic layout or photograph, as a design might respond to a set of programmatic or contextual conditions.

The new visual identity is being incorporated into the firm’s signage, business cards, communications, marketing materials and the updated website – www.lordaecksargent.com – which has an even more responsive interface. Greco noted that the new look is “crisper, underscores our commitment to sustainability and is all about providing exceptional service to our clients through Responsive Design.”

In addition, the firm will be using a new twitter handle – @lordaecksargent – and recently began using a new LinkedIn company page – Lord Aeck Sargent – instead of its former group page. Greco added, “We’ve also just begun using Instagram, which is a great way to show everyone images of some of our many amazing projects. Our Instagram name is lordaecksargent.

“Today is really about celebrating positive changes in the firm – our strong growth and maturation as a design practice, our geographical expansion, our new service offerings and the re-articulation of our core mission to provide Responsive Design in all our practice areas,” Greco said. “We’re also extremely excited about the upcoming move to our new Midtown Atlanta office, which will encourage greater collaboration among our outstanding professionals. We look forward to the exciting future of our architecture and design firm.”

About Lord Aeck Sargent
Lord, Aeck & Sargent Inc. – dba Lord Aeck Sargent – is an award-winning architecture, design and planning firm serving clients in academic, historic preservation, scientific, arts and cultural, multi-family housing and mixed-use, and urban design and planning markets. In 2007, Lord Aeck Sargent was one of the first architecture firms to adopt The 2030 Challenge, an initiative whose ultimate goal is the design of carbon-neutral buildings, or buildings that use no fossil-fuel greenhouse gas-emitting energy to operate, by the year 2030. Lord Aeck Sargent is also calling for increased transparency in the building products industry by urging manufacturers to disclose the chemical components of their products utilizing the Health Product Declaration,™ an industry standard format for conveying details about product content and associated health information, or Declare, the “nutrition label” for building products launched by the International Living Future Institute.

Lord Aeck Sargent has offices in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Lexington, Kentucky; and Washington, D.C. and. For more information, visit the firm at www.lordaecksargent.com.

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