BRPH

BRPH is an architecture and engineering firm founded on Florida’s Space Coast in 1964 by three engineers and an architect. Headquartered in Melbourne, the practice built its reputation on aerospace and defense facilities and has since extended into advanced manufacturing, education, research and commercial work, offering architecture, engineering, interior design and program management under one roof. BRPH is architect of record for Boeing’s South Carolina 787 site expansion in North Charleston, a program of more than $1 billion that includes a roughly 1.2 million-square-foot second final assembly building along with a parts preparation facility, a vertical fin paint facility and additional flight line stalls.

Three engineers working at Cape Canaveral in 1964 recruited an architect and started a firm. That is the origin of BRPH, founded five years before the first moonwalk to support NASA’s Apollo program.

The NASA thread never really stopped. Through the 1970s the firm worked on the Space Shuttle program, including the adaptation of launch pads 39A and 39B and the Vehicle Assembly Building. It completed the pad complexes at Kennedy Space Center in 1985, a first project at Vandenberg in 1986, the Wallops Island Pad 0A in Virginia in 1991, the Kodiak Launch Complex payload processing facility in Alaska in 1998, and the Orion checkout, assembly and payload processing facilities in 2008. In 2013 it delivered the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

Diversification came steadily. The first school design landed in 1968 and the first international project, in Panama, in 1969. A Melbourne office opened in 1980 as the firm shifted from pure engineering toward architecture. Employee ownership arrived in 1990 through an ESOP. A construction services unit was formed in 1996, an Orlando office opened in 1999, and the first commercial design followed in 2001. The manufacturing sector was built out from 2004 to serve production, assembly and testing centers.

That manufacturing work is now some of the firm’s most visible. BRPH designed what it says is the world’s largest cleanroom by volume in 2005, Boeing’s Charleston manufacturing facility, the 787 Dreamliner Final Assembly Building, and the 777X Composite Wing Center in Everett. Other clients include Embraer, Gulfstream, HAECO Americas, Beretta and FOX Shocks, whose Gainesville, Georgia factory won a DBIA National Award of Merit in 2021.

Headquarters remain at 5700 North Harbor City Blvd., Suite 400 in Melbourne, Florida, with offices in Orlando, Jacksonville, Boca Raton, Atlanta, North Charleston, Huntsville, Arlington, Greenwood Village, Tempe, Lynnwood, Palmdale and Goleta. The firm passed 200 employees nationwide in 2014 and reports work in nearly every US state and more than 20 countries.