Corgan

Corgan is a Dallas architecture and design firm that has worked out of the same city since 1938, and now runs 22 offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada. Its practice is built around a handful of building types it has gone deep on rather than a general portfolio: aviation, data centers and mission critical, education, healthcare and workplace. The aviation group is the one most contractors encounter, and it is currently leading the design of the Concourse D widening at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, a $1.4 billion job that takes the 1980 concourse from 60 feet wide to 99 using 19 prefabricated steel modules driven across live airfield pavement. Corgan works with GVSA as associate architect on that project. The firm employs more than a thousand architects, designers and specialists, and its headquarters is at The Luminary on North Houston Street.

Corgan frames the whole practice around one idea it calls Agility in Design: organising the firm around anticipating what architecture will have to accommodate, and being able to change direction quickly when the answer moves. For a studio whose two largest sectors are aviation and data centres, both of which have had their requirements rewritten more than once in the last decade, that is less a slogan than a description of the operating problem.

The featured work shows how wide the aviation practice runs. JFK Terminal 6 is a world-class terminal expansion at one of the busiest airports in the country. The Club SFO by Airport Dimensions is at the opposite scale, a lounge project the firm describes in terms of localising luxury and improving the traveller’s experience: interiors and passenger experience rather than terminal architecture. Both sit under the same aviation group.

On the workplace and corporate side, TIAA’s Frisco Corporate Center and Bank of America Tower at Parkside are the office projects the firm leads with. The Wells Fargo corporate campus is the one that carries a superlative worth checking: Corgan describes it as the largest net positive commercial campus in the United States, meaning it produces more energy than it consumes at campus scale.

The practice is also expanding overseas. Corgan and Strzala Architects announced they will support major capital investment programmes for Manchester Airports Group in the United Kingdom, which puts the aviation group’s work into a second regulatory environment with different terminal standards and procurement rules.

The firm publishes a running News & Insights stream on what it treats as architecture’s most pressing topics, which for a practice this concentrated in aviation and mission-critical work tends to mean capacity, resilience and energy rather than style.

Headquarters remain at The Luminary on North Houston Street in Dallas, the city Corgan has practised from since 1938.