HDR acquires new urbanist firms

HDR, an architecture, engineering, and construction management firm with 3,700 employees, has acquired two small but noted new urbanist design firms, LCA Town Planning & Architecture and Sargent Town Planning. These firms will go under the name HDR/LCA+Sargent Town Planning and will continue to provide urban design and community planning services. HDR/LCA+Sargent Town Planning will have offices in Ventura, California, where Sargent was based, in Portland, Oregon, where LCA was based, and a new office in Oakland, California. Steve Coyle, LCA’s founding partner and principal, will manage the Oakland and Portland offices. David Sargent, Sargent’s managing principal, will direct the Ventura office. Under the corporate structure, Coyle and Sargent will operate as principals of HDR/LCA+Sargent. The community planning section is a small part of Omaha-based HDR, which has 70 offices nationwide and does major work on highways, bridges, environmental engineering projects, healthcare facilities, and other areas of design and construction. James Moore, HDR’s director of community planning, operating from Tampa, Florida, now oversees eight offices around the US with the addition of LCA and Sargent. “The community planning group recognizes that New Urbanism is the viable way of looking at the field,” he says. “It is the right thing to do.” The community planning group has worked with new urbanist consultants such as Seth Harry and will continue to do so, Moore says. The acquisitions, effective January 1, have been in the works for some time, Moore says. More than a year ago Moore says he began to have discussions with author and consultant Peter Katz, who suggested that a major architecture and engineering firm would benefit from acquiring the services of boutique new urbanist firms. LCA and Sargent bring a nationally recognized level of expertise in New Urbanism that can be employed in HDR’s local offices, which are the firm’s strength, Moore says. HDR, in turn, has strong marketing power and an extensive contact base that can be employed to identify New Urbanism opportunities. HDR’s extensive practice in hospital design can work to new urbanists’ advantage in integrating health facilities into neighborhoods, Coyle says. “Even as a small addition to HDR, we intend to leverage the company’s resources and nationwide offices into a force for elegant, intelligent, and sustainable growth,” he says. u