Eight-six years ago, Jack M. Corgan opened the doors to the firm. From the beginning, we’ve been driven by design. At the onset, Jack designed theatres and drive-ins throughout the United States then expanded to public work, the first of many entries into other sectors of architecture. Jack set high standards for himself, giving back to the practice and his expectations of the firm — these pillars still permeate Corgan’s philosophy and culture to this day.
The firm was conceived to anticipate emerging client needs and to respond quickly and powerfully. We've developed that agility over eight decades of continuous invention and innovation. We navigate the changes in our client’s industries and respond with new forms, spaces, and solutions.
Our milestones — these firsts that the firm has achieved — offer a look at our history as well as a glimpse of our future.
Our firm’s projects range from aviation and airport lounges to data centers, education, workplace, multifamily and healthcare. Corgan is the go-to firm in data center design. We are ranked the No. 1 data center architecture firm by Building Design + Construction. Additionally, with 70 years of aviation experience and projects at 200 airports around the world, we are known as the firm that designs airports that perform with functional, technical, and aesthetic excellence. We are also growing in the healthcare arena.
There are several keystone projects we are currently engaged with across all sectors. A few current notable projects include a sustainable corporate campus for Wells Fargo in Irving, Texas; The Juniper, a seven-story mixed-use development by Larkspur in Dallas’ historic Deep Ellum neighborhood; 700 Jackson Street, a multi-phase, mixed-use development in Dallas, Texas; and Parkside, a 450,000 sq. ft. tower that exhibits a form responsive to its location adjacent to the Klyde Warren Park in the center of Dallas (Figure 1).
The Wells Fargo campus in Irving, Texas is a net-positive project that goes beyond net zero to generate more energy onsite than it consumes. An office project of this scale that’s net-positive has never been done before — an aspirational goal and one our team is thrilled to attain. The development will consist of two 10-story office buildings connected to a parking garage via skybridge (Figure 2). With carbon reduction, energy, and water conservation goals well above current benchmarks, this facility promises to be an industry leader setting new standards for corporate campuses.
Corgan started incorporating digital technologies in the mid-1980s with our investment in an Intergraph dual monitor CAD machine (Figure 3). As a leader in technical project delivery, a CAD system of this caliber helped maintain a high level of quality control and standardization.
As mobile computing became commonplace, Corgan took the technology directly to our clients. As we grew and expanded into new regions, mobility was important. We saw the advantage of having computing power in the field and allowed our staff to untether from the office.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) was quickly integrated into our studios in the early 2000’s, with most projects utilizing it by the end of the decade. This transition was a natural one. Designers at Corgan think through the entire causal chain of the built environment, and moving from two-dimensional representation to three and four-dimensional representation only formalized what had long been standard practice.
Cloud-based design work was welcomed as we became one of the earliest BIM360 Teams partners. This advance in collaboration technology enabled expedited timelines and greater control over project delivery milestones. Our swift adoption of this technology played a critical role in our successful transition during Covid-19, as we moved nearly all our production work to the cloud in weeks, not months.
We are now in the age of automation and anticipatory design efforts. We are embracing artificial intelligence and data-driven design. Corgan asks not how we can use the AI tools, but how can the AI tools available might supplement our established design and production methodologies.
“AEC technology” can be broadly defined — certainly everything from pencils and drafting machines to Revit and ChatGPT fit the bill. We use the term “practice technology” and describe it as such:
“Practice technology is any technological solution that enables, enhances, or promotes the practice of architecture and interior design.”
In our view, the use of — and proficiency with — the tools of the trade are table stakes for the profession. A firm principal and an intern may have different roles to play, but they both engage meaningfully with the technology. This is accomplished through our strategic hiring practices, robust practice technology training programs, and direct engagement with project teams. Corgan’s practice technology team has always been closely integrated with each of our design studios, crafting workflows and developing custom tools to solve challenges unique to their architectural typologies (Figure 4). This relationship enables our agile response to firm and sector needs and allows us to set our practice technology priorities in direct response to architectural imperatives.
Our position within the IT team allows us to serve not only the design side of the industry, but also build custom integrations with our CRM platform, and develop proprietary project lifecycle solutions. These tools ensure that the project is well served from pursuit through construction and occupation.
Corgan has grown substantially over its 86-year history, from just a few architects in 1938 to over 1,000 designers, researchers, and industry thought leaders today. Scale brings complexity to all aspects of the business, but especially around training, communication, and solution customization.
Staff education has a number of challenging facets: design processes, architectural best practices, construction techniques, and — most pertinently — practice technology. Often this is approached from the perspective of training folks to press the right button in any given software. While this may get them moving on a deliverable, it lacks the larger perspective that’s needed to understand why a particular tool is appropriate. Our Revit Intensive Training Approach (RITA) grounds our staff in BIM fundamentals, and then supplies the context of how and why Corgan “BIMs” the way we do. Following the basics, staff are shown what it means to provide BIM leadership to a project team — structuring a project execution plan, understanding the tenets of model craftmanship, and effective consultant model coordination. While the tools (Revit, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Navisworks, and others) are present in the discussion, they’re not the point — they’re the result of a structured process.
When our RITA program debuted, we encountered another pervasive challenge: communication. You can build the most robust Revit add-in, an awe-inspiring practice technology workflow, but it will fall on deaf ears without an effective outreach strategy. Emails can be easily overlooked, and changing hearts and minds one person at a time isn’t realistic with a firm of our size. Relying on a single method of communication wasn’t working for us, so we decided to embrace the breadth of it. When rolling out a new workflow, updating the firm on a critical software update, or advertising new content, our practice technology team uses many different forms of communication to pass the message, each with a targeted audience. By combining large-scale email campaigns, team-specific training sessions, and organic conversations with individuals, we can transmit our message much more effectively. Another critical piece of the puzzle is our IT–Practice Forum group. This is a group of staff members who are fervent practice technology advocates, taking our communications directly to their studios. Leveraging messengers beyond our internal team has been incredibly powerful in reaching all levels of the organization.
Another perennial problem for practice technology practitioners is the classic, “buy, build, or borrow.” An architectural software challenge may be appropriately solved with an off-the-shelf tool, or it may necessitate a custom build. This is a question that is not easily formalized, and relies on a careful examination of the costs, benefits, and specific requirements of each situation. Many of our business- based tools require custom solutions: integrations that tie together disparate datasets to yield insights that would otherwise be obscured. Many practice technology solutions have been addressed with tools available in the market, and we simply purchase these tools where possible. Where a process is inherently Corgan-specific, such as our project startup methodology, we code custom Revit add-ins to support our staff. We currently support multiple tools through our Corgan Revit add-in. (Figures 5, 6, 7, and 8). We also host our “Corgan Community” Revit add-in, where we invite members of the staff to develop tools in collaboration with our practice technology team. This enables us to find solutions that satisfy unique market sector requirements much more quickly.
New technologies often drive changes in both the way industries operate and the skills necessary to be effective in those industries. This is evident in the steady march toward a more digital project delivery methodology as well as the expanding skillset that is necessary for architects and interior designers.
While the standard instrument of service for architectural deliverables has long been drawings — first physical and now digital — we see a future that looks very different. Since the models that we use to produce two dimensional drawings contain most of the information necessary to construct the building, there’s no reason that the model could not supplant drawings in telling the design story. There are certainly gaps to address before that stage can be reached — model quality control and quality assurance needs more focus (Figure 9), and there are components of building design that are far more easily drawn than modeled.
Beyond what we can do inside the walls of the architecture firm, however, are the approving jurisdictions. Regardless of the quality or content of our models, they must be accepted by the municipalities and agencies that grant approval. The European market is ahead of the curve here. The UK BIM Framework, and ISO 19650 more broadly, has made model information much more critical to project delivery. Indeed, many countries across the word have made BIM mandatory for public projects. As national construction markets and standards merge into regional agreements, it is inevitable that the model will become a central part of project delivery.
Similarly, we see a shift in the standard set of skills expected of both established designers and those coming out of university. BIM proficiency is now a given, and the future belongs to those who can leverage modes of thinking that unlock efficiency and design solutions not possible under the status quo. “Computational design” may have been the buzzword of the past decade, but the substance underneath it is still an important template for the next decade (Figures 10 and 11). Those that use tools like Dynamo, Grasshopper, and more traditional textual programming languages have learned to think in a process-oriented manner that will translate to future technologies.
At Corgan, we define computational design as “capturing the design process.” By breaking down pieces of a design or documentation task into its component parts and interrogating those parts, we are able to optimize each element. This supercharges the iterative capacity of our designers and also allows them to efficiently deliver the best solutions for our clients. Artificial intelligence is a similar story and has the potential to be the next wave of innovation for the AEC industry. Corgan has been working with both public and private language models, exploring various methodologies of image model training, and more (Figures 12, 13, and 14). While the longevity of AI in AEC is yet unknown, anyone with an eye to the future is exploring the possibilities.
Items on our wish list are born from a common cause: that which is seemingly intuitive and necessary yet is not possible for intractable reasons. Take the notion of interoperability: why must we move model data through four file types and three different programs to simply perform clash detection and coordinate a design (especially when the three programs are made by the same company)? Building data should be standardized and democratized such that it is accessible in a consistent manner by all design professionals. There have been great strides here with the advent of ISO standards and the popularization of open source IFC formats, but there is much work to be done.
Tangentially related is the relative difficulty of using augmented and virtual reality on our projects. Why must we purchase, upskill on, and maintain several different headsets and a mile of extension cords to take advantage of this technology? Solutions that are easily implemented leave us wanting in terms of features or stability. Solutions that deliver value must be created or customized in-house and are difficult to standardize across project scales. A goal of ours has long been to provide AR/VR access to every designer, as it can meaningfully impact the way in which we interact with our projects — a more streamlined experience is key.
One item that may be more achievable given the current AI landscape is predictive model building. Consider that rather than training a model on data scraped from the web, you used behavioral data of architects and interior designers. You could add context to actions that were performed in design programs, giving them relevance to the real world, and place them in a narrative of how buildings are assembled. This is not something that could be logically constructed as a standard piece of software but would need the situational awareness provided by large language models. Assuming these relationships could be built, your design platform may know that once you’ve enclosed a space with four walls, a door will be needed to enter it. Even better, it may automatically adjust the hallway to account for an accessible approach and read the room identity data to intuit if the partitions need to be fire-rated. Something like this would fundamentally reset the relationship of designers to the AEC industry, potentially for the better.
The AEC technology world is a relatively small one; each firm that is fortunate enough to have professionals dedicated to it are typically familiar with one another. These relationships have shown us that the answers to the questions above will likely overlap from any one practice technology advocate to the next. We listen to each other, we help one another where we can, and we struggle with the same problems. The existential global challenge of climate change, the industry upending implications of artificial intelligence, the coming re-making of project delivery into a digitally-based deliverable – these are not problems that can be solved alone, and we look forward the journey together.
Corgan is an employee-owned architecture and design firm with 18 locations and more than 1,000 team members globally. The firm, ranked as the #4 architecture firm by Building Design + Construction, works with clients in a variety of sectors including aviation & mobility, data centers, education, health, mixed- use, multifamily, office, and workplace. Founded in 1938, Corgan has developed a strong reputation for agility in design by anticipating marketplace changes and leading clients to thoughtful, data-driven design solutions. Its research insights and design expertise empower the organization to foresee emerging changes and develop solutions that minimize risk, create flexibility, and maximize longevity. To learn more about Corgan, visit www.corgan.com.
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