Ross Barney Architects

Ross Barney Architects is a Chicago design firm founded by Carol Ross Barney in 1981, working in architecture, urban design and landscape. The practice built its reputation on civic and infrastructure work that most firms treat as utilitarian: CTA rail stations, the Chicago Riverwalk, fire stations, schools, water treatment facilities and federal buildings. That portfolio includes the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the first federal building designed after the 1995 bombing. Ross Barney is part of the joint design team with SOM and Juan Gabriel Moreno Architects on the new Concourse D at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, a $1.455 billion, 19-gate building under the ORDNext program. Carol Ross Barney received the AIA Gold Medal in 2023.

Two words recur across the Ross Barney Architects site: justice and urban sensitivity. The studio states it is dedicated to empowering a sense of place, pride and belonging – in its work and in its own studio – and that great places and buildings strengthen community by nurturing economic development and equitable wealth building. For a practice whose portfolio leans civic, that is less a mission statement than a filter on what work it takes.

The practice is not architecture alone. It carries a Director of Landscape Architecture on staff, which puts site and building under one roof rather than splitting them between firms – a structure that matters on the transit, riverfront and campus projects where the ground plane does most of the work.

Recent and current projects on the studio’s own site include the Fermilab Office, Technical and Education Center in Batavia, Illinois, and the Swenson Civil Engineering Building in Duluth, Minnesota.

Founder Carol Ross Barney, FAIA, HASLA, received a Gold Medal citation from the American Institute of Architects in 2023. The firm points readers toward the Art Institute of Chicago’s Oral History Project for a fuller account of her career.