Kendall/Heaton Associates

Kendall/Heaton Associates is a Houston-based architecture firm that serves as architect of record on major commercial towers and corporate projects nationwide. The firm partners with high-profile design architects to carry buildings through documentation, coordination, and construction, and is serving as architect of record on the Mutual of Omaha Headquarters Tower. Its practice centers on large-scale office, mixed-use, and institutional work where technical delivery and code coordination matter as much as design. The firm has contributed to some of the tallest buildings in Texas and beyond.

Kendall/Heaton Associates plays a specific and demanding role in large commercial architecture: architect of record. Based in Houston, the firm carries major commercial towers and corporate projects through the technical phases where a design becomes a buildable, code-compliant reality, and it does that work nationwide rather than confining itself to Texas. It’s a role that rarely gets public attention and yet determines whether an ambitious building can actually be built.
The architect-of-record function is easy to overlook and genuinely hard to do well. It is the discipline of taking a project through documentation, coordination, and construction — resolving how a building is actually detailed, how it satisfies code within a particular jurisdiction, and how the drawings hold together once contractors are pricing and building from them. Every one of those steps compounds on a large project, where a single unresolved detail can ripple across dozens of trades. On a commercial tower, that delivery rigor matters as much as the initial design concept, because a concept that can’t be documented and coordinated never leaves the page.
By concentrating on commercial towers and architect-of-record services, Kendall/Heaton occupies a lane that high-profile design firms frequently rely on rather than staff themselves. The partnership model is common in large-scale work: one firm sets the design vision while another carries the technical delivery, and the second role is exactly the one this firm has built its practice around.
Working across the United States, Kendall/Heaton brings that focus to large, technically complex buildings — the projects where the distance between a rendering and a finished structure is widest, and where getting the record set right is what finally closes it. That is why so much marquee commercial construction depends on a dedicated architect of record working alongside the design firm, and why a Houston practice built expressly around that role keeps drawing national commercial-tower work to it.