Gensler

Gensler is the largest architecture firm in the world by headcount, with more than 6,000 people across 57 offices in 16 countries, and it has been operating out of San Francisco since 1965. The practice covers architecture, interior design, planning, workplace strategy, brand design and research, and it built its reputation on commercial interiors before scaling into supertall towers, airports and civic work. Notable projects include Shanghai Tower and the net-zero program at San Francisco International Airport Terminal 1. In the Bay Area, Gensler designed 2125 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, a 97-unit affordable housing building for Mercy Housing California that topped out in July 2026. The firm is also architect on the office-to-residential conversion at 235 East 42nd Street in Manhattan, the largest such project in New York City history.

The profile above captures Gensler’s scale and its landmark projects, so this section focuses on the range of services behind that reputation. Operating from San Francisco since 1965, the firm built its name on commercial interiors before expanding, and interior design remains a core discipline alongside architecture and urban design and planning.
What is less widely understood is how far the service list now reaches beyond buildings. Workplace strategy helps organizations decide how space should actually support the way they work, a question that has only grown more pressing as offices are rethought. Brand design and digital experience design extend the practice into how a place communicates and how people interact with it, blurring the line between architecture and the experience of a space. Building transformation and adaptive reuse address the growing need to remake existing structures rather than build new, which is where much of the industry’s attention has shifted.
That thinking is grounded in the firm’s own research. The Gensler Research Institute publishes workplace surveys, the annual Design Forecast, and topic studies on cities, sustainability, and adaptive reuse, feeding real data back into the design work. With offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, and Singapore among more than fifty locations worldwide, and a workforce in the hundreds and beyond, Gensler applies that combined design and research capacity across a genuinely global set of projects.
Operating from San Francisco since 1965 and now the largest architecture firm in the world by headcount, Gensler pairs that scale with a research arm that keeps the design work grounded in current data on how people use space. For an owner, the breadth, from workplace strategy and brand design through adaptive reuse and digital experience, means a single firm can shape not just a building but how an organization occupies and communicates through it, across offices from London to Singapore and more than fifty locations besides.