Alamo Architects

Alamo Architects is a San Antonio practice that has been working for about four decades from a converted building on South Flores Street. The firm’s portfolio runs across civic, education, hospitality, workplace and mixed-use projects, with a consistent thread of building in and around historic downtown fabric. It handles adaptive reuse regularly, which is a practical necessity in a city whose core is largely pre-war. Alamo Architects is a design architect on the Tower Life Residences conversion, turning the 1929 Tower Life Building into roughly 244 apartments, where senior principal Irby Hightower has spoken publicly about the project. The firm employs several dozen people.

The Texas Society of Architects named Alamo Architects its Firm of the Year in 2014, the highest honor the state society confers on a practice, citing a thirty-year record of contributions to the built environment, the community and the profession.

The office opened in 1984. Its first widely noticed job arrived a year later, when the 1906 Fairmount Hotel was winched across downtown to a new site instead of being demolished; AIA San Antonio gave that project its Twenty-Five Year Award in 2020. In 1987 the firm designed the 144-acre site for San Antonio’s Papal Mass, re-creating the steps and towers of a mission church as a stage for an open-air service.

Staffing and disciplines

Alamo describes itself today as a multidisciplinary firm of nearly 70 people working across architecture, planning, interior design, adaptive reuse and landscape architecture. The portfolio is organized by sector rather than by project size: higher education, PreK-12 schools, multifamily housing, healthcare and research, civic and cultural buildings, urban design and planning, retail placemaking, interiors, parking structures, and animal care facilities.

Recent completions include the UTSA Science and Engineering Building, delivered with Treanor in 2020; the Northside ISD John Jay High School Fine Arts Facility, which earned TASA/TASB Stars of Distinction for design, wellness and community in 2025 and an ENR Texas and Louisiana Award of Merit the same year; UT Health San Antonio’s Multispecialty and Research Hospital, completed in 2024 with Page; the UT Health Center for Brain Health in 2025; and Four25 San Pedro, among the first permanent supportive multifamily developments in the metro area.

Affordable and mixed-income housing runs through the recent award list. 100 Labor, a four-story San Antonio Housing Authority development at Labor Street and Cesar Chavez Boulevard, won the 2026 AIA San Antonio Residential Design Award for a multifamily structure. Artisan at Ruiz took the equivalent CRAN award in 2025, and the Townhomes at Cedar and Pereida were an honoree the same year.

Two principals, Irby Hightower and Mike McGlone, have been elevated to Fellow by the AIA. McGlone and principal Nicki Marrone have each served as president of both AIA San Antonio and the Texas Society of Architects. The firm’s own home, the SoFlo campus on South Flores Street, is an adaptive reuse of mid-century industrial buildings developed jointly with OCO Architects and certified LEED Silver.