Epstein

Epstein is a multi-disciplinary architecture, engineering and construction firm headquartered at 600 West Fulton in Chicago, founded in 1921 as A. Epstein and Sons International. The practice is unusual in keeping architecture, engineering and construction delivery under one roof rather than specializing, which suits industrial and process-heavy work where the building and the equipment inside it get designed together. Sectors run to food and beverage processing, aviation and transportation, government, higher education and commercial interiors, with offices in Chicago, New York and Morrisville, North Carolina. Epstein is one of the architects on the Station Modernization project at Chicago Union Station, working alongside FXCollaborative as Amtrak advances the Chicago Hub Improvement Program through final design.

The firm opened on 15 July 1921, when Abraham Epstein, a Russian immigrant and University of Illinois graduate, hung out a shingle at 2011 Pershing Road in Chicago as A. Epstein, Structural Engineer. Engineering came first, and architecture and construction were built around it rather than the other way round.

Two turns shaped what the practice is now. In the 1950s it became an early adopter of design-build delivery while moving into high-rise work. In the 2000s it converted to 100 percent employee ownership, and it marked its centennial in 2021 still independent.

Along the way the firm worked with Mies van der Rohe on Chicago’s Federal Center in the 1960s, and opened offices in Tel Aviv and Paris that same decade, followed by London and Warsaw in the 1970s. The Warsaw office remains, alongside Chicago, New York and Raleigh.

Disciplines held in-house are architecture, civil engineering, structural engineering, MEP and fire protection engineering, industrial process engineering, interiors, planning and design-build delivery. Sustainability consulting covers LEED and BREEAM certification support and energy modelling.

Named projects give a sense of the range: the Prestage Foods of Iowa pork processing plant, Mennica Legacy Tower in Warsaw, and the Riverview Bridge in Chicago. A food plant, an office tower and a pedestrian river crossing out of the same office. The firm also completed what it describes as the world’s largest pork processing facility during the 2000s, which is the kind of commission that only goes to a practice where the process engineers and the architects sit in the same building.