Magnusson Klemencic Associates

Magnusson Klemencic Associates is a structural and civil engineering firm headquartered at 1301 Fifth Avenue in Seattle, with a second office on South Wacker Drive in Chicago. It traces back to the W.H. Witt Company, founded in Seattle in 1920, and now employs several hundred engineers. The firm runs a flat structure in which senior staff stay on projects, and works on towers, stadiums, museums, campuses and transportation structures in the United States and abroad. Seattle work includes the Olympic Sculpture Park. The MKA Foundation, the firm’s charitable arm, is one of the funders of the Charles Pankow Foundation’s CURE research programme on cutting embodied carbon through structural code changes.

Two offices, 62 countries. That ratio is the most unusual thing about how this firm operates.

Most engineering practices of comparable reach grow by opening local offices. MKA works from Seattle at 1301 Fifth Avenue and Chicago at 111 South Wacker Drive, and exports the work rather than the staff — more than $100 billion in completed project value engineered from two rooms. It is the structural counterpart to the flat organisational model described above, where senior engineers stay on projects rather than moving into pure management.

The current project list shows the range. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which took a 2026 SEAOI Engineering Award. The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. San Diego Airport Terminal 1. The Seattle Aquarium Ocean Pavilion. The BMO Centre expansion in Calgary. A library, a hospital, an airport terminal, an aquarium and a convention centre are five different structural problems — long spans, vibration criteria, seismic performance, marine environment and phased construction over live operations respectively — and a firm carrying all five simultaneously is running deep technical specialisms rather than a single house approach.

The civil side sits alongside the structural practice rather than beneath it, covering site, utility and stormwater engineering on the same projects.

Seattle is 206.292.1200; Chicago is 312.683.1200. The firm maintains Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Vimeo channels.