MGA Partners

MGA Partners is a Philadelphia architecture, planning and urban design firm. It was founded in 1958 as Mitchell/Giurgola Associates Architects, and the succeeding leadership established MGA Partners in 1990. The studio has three partners and about twenty professionals and is a certified small and women-owned business. Its clients are mostly colleges and universities, cultural and civic groups, nonprofits and government agencies, and its projects often reach 60 to 70 percent small and women-owned business participation. MGA designed the Mütter Museum and College of Physicians of Philadelphia expansion, which cuts a new accessible entrance into an adjacent church building and links it to the college through a second new door.

MGA groups its work into four themes rather than building types: reviving heritage buildings, realising a sustainable future, designing in context, and masterplanning and visioning. The firm says it pursues design excellence across all project typologies while drawing out the essential themes in each, which is a way of saying the studio would rather be judged on approach than on a sector list.

The office is small by design – three partners and roughly twenty professionals, working from Old City, Philadelphia – and the client list skews institutional: colleges and universities, cultural and civic organisations, nonprofits, and federal and local government. The firm is a signatory to the AIA 2030 Commitment, the industry’s framework for reporting building energy performance toward carbon-neutral operation, so energy modelling data on its projects is reported rather than asserted.

Diversity in project teams is stated as a practice rather than a policy page, and it comes with a number: the firm says it often achieves 60 to 70 percent small and women-owned business participation on its projects. On publicly funded work with participation goals, that track record is the kind of thing worth asking the firm to document for a specific job.

Recent professional activity is dense for a studio this size. AIA Philadelphia inaugurated partner Katie Broh as its 2026 board president, and Katie Broh and Elsa de Leon have both been elected to that chapter’s board. Former partner Bob Shuman won the Thomas U. Walter Award. The Fintech Innovation Hub at the University of Delaware won an AIA Delaware Design Excellence award, and the firm’s Academic Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania took a Ceramics of Italy award. A new commencement ceremony design for Washington University in St. Louis won an AIA Philadelphia Design Excellence award. AIA Pennsylvania has recognised MGA as an EPiC firm for supporting emerging professionals.

Teaching runs alongside practice: staff have hosted Drexel architecture students for an AIAS firm crawl, taught design classes at the E.M. Stanton School, and run a foundation architecture immersion for high school students at Pitt.