LRK, Harbor Town designer, petitions court

Looney Ricks Kiss (LRK), a Memphis, Tennessee, architecture and planning firm that has played a key role in Harbor Town and other traditional neighborhood developments, filed a petition Feb. 24 to undergo Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Founded in 1983, LRK grew to a 240-person firm with nine offices as the company amassed a national client base. The firm’s diversification — handling work ranging from single-family houses to multifamily complexes and from office to retail — proved unable to protect it from the national real estate collapse that began in 2007. The Daily News of Memphis reported that LRK has shrunk to a work force of 46 people in four offices: Memphis, Princeton, New Jersey, Celebration, Florida, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “I’m hopeful that we see improvement this year, but everything I hear and read says it’s really looking at 2011 before we see a lot of significant improvement,” Managing Principal Frank Ricks told the newspaper. The firm will try to match its staff size and costs to the workload to survive in the months ahead. Ricks told New Urban News that the firm is currently involved in new urban projects in Colorado, Kansas, Virginia, Mississippi, Poland, and Chile, and is seeing an increase in transit-oriented developments.