LMN Architects

LMN Architects is a Seattle practice known for civic and higher-education work, including convention centers, performing arts venues and university buildings across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The firm has been an early and consistent adopter of mass timber on institutional projects, where exposed structure has to satisfy both an architectural intent and a fire and seismic engineering case. LMN designed UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate Academic Building, a five-storey mass-timber classroom block on Campanile Way carrying 27 general-assignment classrooms and a 400-seat auditorium at a total project cost of $136.8 million. The building sits on the campus’s most protected view corridor, which drove its massing, ground-level arcade and facade treatment.

The initials belong to the three architects who started the practice in Seattle in 1979: George Loschky, Judsen Marquardt and John Nesholm. Forty-odd years on, LMN still works from a single office at 801 2nd Avenue downtown, and the shape of that office is the unusual part. Rather than splitting into practice groups by building type, roughly 100 design professionals operate as one blended studio under eight partners. Architects, interior designers, urban designers, sustainability specialists and design researchers sit together and move between project types instead of staying inside a sector.

The portfolio is sorted into six categories: arts and culture, convention centers, education, transportation, urban design and urban mixed use. Recent Seattle work includes the Summit Building at the Seattle Convention Center, a vertical convention center stacked onto a constrained downtown site, and the Ocean Pavilion at the Seattle Aquarium. Beyond the region, the firm completed the Computing and Data Science building at Stanford University, announced in October 2025, and a computer design research and learning center at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Recognition sits heavily in AIA programs. LMN received the AIA National Architecture Firm Award in 2016, and the practice lists more than 100 AIA awards overall, among them 15 national AIA Honor Awards.

The studio publishes its own research rather than keeping it internal. Ongoing work on the site includes a Path to Zero Carbon series and post-occupancy studies that return to finished buildings to measure how they actually perform in use.

New business inquiries go to Cristian Asher, Director of Business Development, on (206) 788-4331. The general studio line is 206.682.3460, and design@lmnarchitects.com reaches the office directly.