NBBJ is a global architecture and design firm founded in 1943 and headquartered in Seattle, with a practice weighted toward healthcare, science, technology, and workplace design. The firm designed OHSU’s Vista Pavilion, the 14-story cancer and inpatient tower on Portland’s Marquam Hill, and it has shaped hospitals, research buildings, and corporate campuses for clients across the country. NBBJ leans on evidence-based design, using research on how buildings affect health, focus, and recovery to drive plan decisions rather than styling. Its healthcare portfolio has made it a frequent choice for academic medical centers weighing complex, phased expansions on constrained urban campuses.
NBBJ is an architecture firm, but the studio’s services reach well past drawing buildings. The practice spans interior design, urban design, experience design, healthcare consulting, lighting design, environmental graphic design, and workplace strategy, disciplines that let it shape not only a building’s form but how people move through it, read it and use it once it opens. Founded in 1943 and headquartered in Seattle, the firm brings that multidisciplinary depth to complex, long-lived projects rather than treating the extras as add-ons.
The studio describes itself as ideas-driven, aiming to design healthy buildings, strong communities and a resilient environment, a philosophy it carries from hospital campuses through to corporate workplaces. Keeping lighting, wayfinding graphics, interiors and workplace strategy in-house means those layers are coordinated with the architecture from the earliest stages rather than bolted on by separate consultants late in the process, when the room to integrate them has already narrowed. For a client, that tends to show up as a building whose parts feel considered together instead of assembled.
NBBJ operates from eight studios, in Seattle, Boston, Charlotte, Columbus, Los Angeles, New York, Portland and San Francisco, with the Seattle office at 223 Yale Avenue North. A workforce of 500 or more spread across those cities gives the firm the reach to serve national clients while keeping a local presence in several major markets at once. For an academic medical center weighing a phased expansion, a technology client planning a campus, or an organization rethinking how its workplace supports its people, the appeal is a single firm that can carry a project from urban planning and architecture through interiors, lighting, environmental graphics and the strategy for how the finished space will actually be used day to day.
Founded in 1943 and running eight studios from Seattle to Boston, NBBJ folds interiors, urban design, lighting, graphics and workplace strategy into its architecture for clients weighing complex, long-term projects.
