STV is a New York engineering, architecture and construction-management firm with roots going back to 1912. It’s best known for transportation infrastructure — rail, transit, bridges and highways — but the practice reaches into buildings and program management too. STV is providing construction management on six of the ramps and bridges at the new I-490 and Illinois Route 390 interchange near O’Hare, coordinating one of the more complex pieces of that corridor. With thousands of staff across offices nationwide, STV sits among the larger dedicated infrastructure design and CM firms working on U.S. public projects.
STV’s name carries more history than most infrastructure firms admit to. The firm traces the letters to 1967, when Sanders & Thomas, itself a renamed successor to the 1945 Pottstown Tool and Engineering Company, acquired Voss Engineering and used STV for the first time. STV Incorporated took its current form in 1972, when it acquired Seelye Stevenson Value & Knecht, the firm descended from Elwyn E. Seelye & Co., founded in New York City in 1912.
That merged lineage now operates at a different scale: STV’s own site reports more than 3,300 employees across 65-plus offices in North America, a footprint that put the firm at 32nd in Engineering News-Record’s Top 500 Design Firms ranking. In 2024, STV moved its headquarters into a new flagship office in the Empire State Building.
STV organizes its work into four service lines: advisory, planning and program development, design and engineering, and project delivery, which the firm describes as spanning a project’s full lifecycle from early strategic engagement through construction delivery.
The firm’s project history includes several landmark restorations and civic buildings. STV served as lead engineer for the restoration of Grand Central Terminal, which earned the Presidential Design Award in 2000, and later served as engineer- and architect-of-record, as part of the Downtown Design Partnership, for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which received a Grand Award from the American Council of Engineering Companies in 2016. In 2023, STV’s program and construction management team was honored at the national level with an ACEC Grand Award for transforming Delta Air Lines’ Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport.
More recently, STV provided full architectural and engineering design services for the 150,000-square-foot High School for Construction Trades, Engineering and Architecture in Queens, New York, developed for the New York City School Construction Authority. The project was designed so the building itself teaches: mechanical and electrical systems are left visible, and construction joints and material transitions are intentionally expressed as instructional tools for students pursuing careers in the building trades and STEM fields.
Across more than a century of predecessor firms, STV’s own account of its history stays anchored to a single throughline, engineering and design work tied to how people move through and use infrastructure, from rail terminals to the schools training the next generation of builders.
