RIOS

RIOS is a Los Angeles design practice that works across architecture, landscape architecture, interiors, urban design, graphics and product design out of a single studio. The firm treats those as one discipline rather than separate service lines, which shows up most clearly in masterplanning work where the buildings, the ground plane and the wayfinding get designed together. Its portfolio spans civic and cultural projects, campuses, hospitality, workplace and large-scale district planning across the United States. RIOS is master planner and urban designer on The 1901 Project in Chicago, the $7 billion, 55-acre redevelopment of the surface lots surrounding the United Center, whose full buildout calls for 9,500 residential units, 25 acres of open space and a new CTA Pink Line station.

About 300 people now work at RIOS, across offices in Los Angeles, Austin, Boulder, New York, London, Singapore and Shanghai. The founding studio is in Leimert Park, and the practice describes forty years of operation at the intersection of its disciplines.

Mark Rios, FAIA and FASLA, founded the firm. He holds both a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design along with a Bachelor of Architecture from USC, which is the clearest explanation available for why the studio refuses to treat building and ground plane as separate commissions.

The firm’s own shorthand for its range is cups to cities: product design at one end, district planning at the other. Built and current work includes the Ellison Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, One Beverly Hills, renovation work at the Hollywood Bowl, the NBCUniversal master plan, Grand Park downtown, and the Sony Pictures Mid-Wilshire campus. A separate residential practice operates as RIOS Home.

Stated values are joy, inclusivity, audacity, originality, attunement and resiliency, with a Social Impact Initiative attached to the inclusivity value.

Experience design sits alongside architecture, landscape architecture, interiors, urban design and master planning as a named discipline rather than a service add-on. That is what makes the wayfinding, graphics and identity work on a large district read as part of the same commission rather than a separate consultant scope bolted on at the end.