DLR Group is an integrated design firm founded in Omaha, Nebraska in 1966 and owned entirely by its employees — about 1,800 of them across more than 30 offices in the United States plus Dubai and Shanghai. The firm keeps architecture, engineering, interiors and planning under one roof, along with specialist practices in acoustics, audiovisual systems, lighting and theater planning that most firms its size subcontract out. Its work spans civic, cultural and performing arts, federal, healthcare, higher education, hospitality, justice, K-12, mixed-use, sports and workplace projects. DLR Group led design on the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center learning campus in California, an 81,000-square-foot vocational and education complex delivered with Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects and opened in February 2026. The firm does not designate a single corporate headquarters; the Omaha office remains its founding location.
Three people started this firm. Architects Irv Dana and Bill Larson and engineer Jim Roubal opened for business on April 1, 1966, in a 12-foot-square basement in Omaha. The firm’s history page still frames the decision the way the founders did: less about what they stood to gain than what they could give back to the community they lived in.
Sixty years on, Omaha is one of more than 30 DLR Group offices. The Midwest cluster runs through Lincoln, Des Moines, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Chicago, with the rest spread coast to coast: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Colorado Springs, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Durham, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Riverside, Sacramento, two San Diego locations, San Francisco, Seattle, Sonoma, Tucson, Washington D.C. and West Palm Beach, plus Dubai and Shanghai.
Growth has come through acquisition as well as hiring. In August 2026 the firm acquired McFarlane Architects, a San Diego science and technology design practice, deepening its laboratory and research work.
The firm’s own milestones read more clearly than any services list. The Boeing Everett 777 Office Complex, finished in 1991 at well over two million square feet, was the largest project DLR Group had delivered to that point. The Wayne L. Morse United States Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, completed in 2006, was the GSA’s first LEED Gold new-construction building. Bemidji High School in Minnesota, opened in 2001, was the firm’s first small-learning-community high school, a K-12 planning model it has applied widely since. The renovated Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum took an AIA COTE Top Ten award in 2018, and the $300 million modernization of USC’s Memorial Coliseum put sports, hospitality, higher education and historic preservation specialists on a single team.
Current work is similarly broad: the Ismaili Center in Houston, Compton High School in California, the Chinatown Rose Pak Station in San Francisco, Terminal 1 at the Port of Vancouver USA, and a 590-foot tower with a prismatic concert hall on Shanghai’s Baoshan waterfront.
Two ideas shape how DLR Group presents itself. One is a six-word brand promise, elevate the human experience through design, which appears on nearly every page of its site. The other is employee ownership, treated as a recruiting argument as much as a corporate structure: sector, discipline and executive leaders are deliberately dispersed across offices instead of concentrated in a head office, and the careers pitch is to become an owner rather than an employee. The published core values are commitment, creativity, environmental stewardship, fun, integrity, ownership, sharing and teamwork.
Research sits inside the practice as well. DLR Group publishes a resilient design program organized by topic, with insights, strategies and case studies, alongside an annual report and a climate risk report.
