CO Architects

CO Architects is a Los Angeles design firm specializing in complex healthcare, academic medical, and science buildings. Founded in 1986 as an outgrowth of Anshen + Allen’s LA practice, the firm has become one of the country’s most recognized healthcare and higher-education architects. CO Architects is co-designing the $1.7 billion Harbor-UCLA Medical Center Replacement in Torrance with HMC Architects, delivering a new hospital and lab building for LA County. Its portfolio centers on teaching hospitals, research labs, and university facilities.

Behind the healthcare and academic reputation sits a specific set of services. CO Architects offers architectural design, master planning, medical and laboratory planning, interior design, facade design, and programming. Two of those are specialties that set the firm apart: medical and laboratory planning is a technical discipline in itself — organizing the equipment, workflows, and code requirements of hospitals and research labs — and facade design treats a building’s exterior as its own engineering and aesthetic problem rather than a finish applied at the end. Master planning and programming, meanwhile, place the firm at the front end of large projects, before individual buildings are drawn.

This is a mid-sized studio, in the range of 51 to 200 people. That headcount matches the complexity of the work: teaching hospitals, science buildings, and academic medical centers demand large, tightly coordinated teams, and a firm this size can staff several major institutional projects at once without outgrowing the specialization that defines it.

The practice is based in Los Angeles and works on institutional projects nationally, concentrating on academic, science and technology, healthcare, and civic and government sectors. That national reach from a single LA office is characteristic of specialist institutional architects, whose command of a particular building type travels further than a local general practice’s would. For a hospital system or a university weighing who can handle a complex medical or research building, that depth in a narrow set of sectors is the point.

For a health system or university, the value of a specialist is straightforward: a firm that has organized dozens of hospitals and research labs already understands the equipment clearances, infection-control requirements, and lab workflows a generalist would be learning on the client’s project. That accumulated fluency in medical and laboratory planning is exactly what turns CO Architects’ narrow focus into an asset rather than a limitation.