SmithGroup

SmithGroup is an integrated architecture, engineering and planning firm founded in Detroit in 1853, making it one of the oldest continuously operating design practices in the United States. The employee-owned firm works from 19 offices across North America and in Shanghai, with practice areas covering health, science and technology, higher education, workplace, urban design and water infrastructure. SmithGroup is design architect, with Bennett Partners as associate architect, on Research and Innovation Building A at Texas A&M-Fort Worth, an 11-story lab and office building that broke ground in the Switchyard Innovation District on August 5, 2026. The building will house aerospace, engineering, agriculture, health sciences and biotechnology research programs, with completion expected in 2029.

SmithGroup runs its global headquarters out of Detroit’s Guardian Building, the Art Deco tower the firm itself designed in the 1920s, and the firm’s current Detroit office underwent a 2021 renovation that earned WELL and LEED Gold certification. Company materials put the firm at roughly 1,600 employees across 21 offices, with work spanning six continents, and rankings that include #16 on Architectural Record’s Top 300 U.S. architecture firms and #63 on Engineering News-Record’s Top 500 design firms.

The practice organizes its work around thirteen named markets — cities, civic, corporate & commercial, cultural, federal, health, higher education, hospitality, mixed-use, multifamily residential, parks & open spaces, science & technology, senior living and waterfront — backed by services ranging from campus planning and lab planning to coastal engineering and acoustics & vibration consulting. That breadth traces back to the firm’s roots as one of the first multidisciplinary architecture-and-engineering practices in the country, a structure it adopted in 1907 when the original architecture office partnered with engineers.

Higher education is one of the deeper benches: SmithGroup describes serving more than 500 higher-education clients, from Ivy League universities to community colleges, through a team combining campus planners, strategists and architects. Recent work named on the firm’s own site includes a multicultural center at Michigan State University, an engineering building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and STEM facilities at Texas A&M University’s Victoria campus and at Chico State.

The firm has also been adding U.S. offices in recent years, opening in Sacramento and Houston in 2022 as it expanded its Western and Texas presence. Governance runs through a managing-partner structure — Roxanne Malek and Troy Thompson currently hold that role — atop a board of more than a dozen principals across the firm’s disciplines, consistent with SmithGroup’s status as an employee-owned company. That ownership structure, paired with the firm’s own 21-office footprint, is part of how SmithGroup frames its scale on its company fact sheet: less a network of loosely connected branch offices than a single integrated design firm working from many addresses at once.