Hickok Cole

Hickok Cole is an architecture and interior design firm founded in 1988 as Michael E. Hickok Architects, based at 301 N Street NE in Washington, DC, with a second studio in Richmond, Virginia. The practice employs roughly eighty-five people and works on commercial office buildings, multifamily housing, institutional projects and workplace interiors, along with repositioning older buildings for new uses. It runs its own research arm looking at building performance and material choices. Hickok Cole is one of the architects on the Barry Farm-Hillsdale redevelopment in Southeast Washington, the District’s rebuild of a demolished public housing site into a mixed-income neighbourhood served by a district geothermal system.

Hickok Cole states it has no signature style, and treats that as a position rather than a gap. The firm describes a shared commitment to finding the right design solution over maintaining a recognisable one, with cross-collaborative project teams that pull expertise as needed instead of assigning work to a fixed studio. Its internal culture line is that great ideas can come from anywhere – big or small, pragmatic or far-fetched.

The firm is headquartered locally in Washington, DC, and is a Certified Business Enterprise (CBE), the District’s designation for locally based businesses, which carries weight on public and public-private work in the city.

Two pieces of recent work show the range. Hickok Cole designed the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration, an immersive space within the organisation’s historic DC headquarters, which the firm describes as pushing the boundaries of architecture, fabrication and technology. Separately, it led the design team on the region’s first net zero energy office renovation – a different kind of problem entirely, where the constraints are envelope performance, load reduction and on-site generation rather than narrative.

Office-to-residential conversion is an active research area for the practice, published under its “What’s Next Now” series. With Washington’s Class B office stock repricing, that is not an academic interest.

The firm has been at this for more than thirty years.