RATIO

RATIO is an architecture and design practice headquartered at 101 South Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis, with additional offices in Chicago and Raleigh. The firm works across architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, planning and preservation, and its portfolio leans heavily toward higher education, cultural, civic and healthcare buildings, the kind of work where a client owns the asset for fifty years and cares more about durability than novelty. RATIO is design architect on the University of Cincinnati’s Block 1 and Block 2 residence halls at McMillan and Vine, a $326 million, 546,606-square-foot complex adding more than 1,300 beds across four buildings. It is the largest housing development in the university’s history and topped out in spring 2026.

The studio count has grown past what most directory entries show. RATIO now works from Indianapolis, Chicago, Denver, Raleigh, Champaign, Kansas City and Milwaukee, the last two following the firm’s combination with Helix Architecture + Design of Kansas City, which extended its reach into Missouri and Kansas.

The disciplines under one roof are architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, urban design, historic preservation and graphic design. Preservation sitting alongside new work is not incidental. It shapes the kind of commission the firm attracts, where an institution is adding to a campus it already owns rather than starting on bare ground.

Bottleworks District in Indianapolis, the adaptive reuse of the former Coca-Cola bottling plant on Massachusetts Avenue, won both the ULI Global and ULI Americas Awards for Excellence. Other recent and current work includes Acro Seoul Forest in South Korea, the Vibrant Central District and the Heritage Square Master Plan in Durham, North Carolina, and Cranes Landing in Denver.

Sector coverage runs through higher education, K-12, civic and cultural, parks and recreation, sports and venues, workplace, hospitality, health and life sciences, residential and mixed-use.

The firm describes its own method as designing in the open, meaning clients and community members are inside the conversation rather than shown a finished scheme, with the work drawing on input across all of those practice areas rather than a single lead discipline.

The Indianapolis studio frames its identity around the city’s history as a purpose-built capital, and notes it has practised there for close to a quarter of the city’s existence.