Goettsch Partners

Goettsch Partners is a Chicago architecture firm known for high-rise towers and crisp modern commercial buildings. The firm designed Nashville’s Paramount tower, a 60-story residential high-rise that will become the city’s tallest building once complete. Goettsch works internationally on office towers, mixed-use developments, and residential high-rises, with a design language rooted in the Chicago tradition of structural clarity and floor-to-ceiling glass. Its projects tend to push height and efficiency, the priorities that drive dense urban development.

Disciplines under one roof
Goettsch Partners works across four connected disciplines, and the pairing is telling. Architecture is the core, but the firm also offers interior design, urban planning, and, notably, building enclosure design, the specialized engineering of a building’s facade and skin. For a practice known for glass towers, treating enclosure design as its own discipline rather than an afterthought is significant: the exterior wall is where a tall building’s performance, appearance, and energy behavior are ultimately decided.
Interior design lets the firm carry a project inward from the structure to the spaces people actually occupy, keeping the language of a building consistent from its exterior right through to its finishes. Urban planning works at the opposite scale, positioning a building within its block, its district, and its city, which matters for the dense, high-rise sites where the firm tends to work.
That work is run from three offices, the firm’s Chicago headquarters plus locations in Denver and Shanghai, giving it a footprint across North America and Asia and supporting the projects it takes on internationally. With a team of roughly 51 to 200 people, Goettsch keeps those disciplines, architecture, interiors, planning, and enclosure design, within a single mid-sized practice rather than spread across separate firms.
Concentrating enclosure design, interiors, and planning alongside the core architecture has a practical payoff on the kind of tall, efficient buildings the firm pursues. Decisions about a facade’s structure and glazing feed directly into how the interiors are laid out and how the building sits in its surroundings, and keeping those conversations inside one office avoids the gaps that open up when the work is divided among separate consultants. From its Chicago base, and through its Denver and Shanghai offices, Goettsch applies that integrated approach to the office towers, mixed-use developments, and high-rise residences it designs in cities around the world.