RAW International

RAW International is a Los Angeles architecture and planning firm on South Figueroa Street downtown, with branch offices in Roseville, Calif., and Flagstaff, Ariz. It describes itself as a diverse team that works with clients and community groups to sort out programming, planning and design problems, and its portfolio is weighted toward public clients. Transit is a big piece of that. Its featured work includes transit-oriented development at Fairview Heights next to Metro’s Crenshaw/LAX light rail station, the east portal at Union Station and a lobby and security upgrade at San Francisco’s Philip Burton Federal Building. On the Vermont Transit Corridor bus rapid transit line, it’s a partner in the AECOM-led Vermont Corridor Partners joint venture handling planning and design for LA Metro.

The portfolio is organized into three practice areas — transit-oriented development, federal work and public works — and that structure, rather than a building type, is what the firm leads with.

The transit list goes well beyond the best-known entries. Exposition Light Rail Phase 2. The Mid-Coast Corridor Trolley Project. The Westside Extension, the project long known as Subway to the Sea. The Rosa Parks Station TOD Master Plan. The Crenshaw/Prairie Transit Corridor. Several of those are corridor-scale planning commissions rather than single stations, which is a different discipline from designing a building: the client is a transit agency, the site is linear, and the neighbors are the project.

Outside transit, the range widens considerably. Select work includes the Motown Records relocation, a Kaiser Baldwin Hills medical office, the LAWA ConRAC consolidated rental car facility, and a Target store. A record label’s offices, a medical office building, a rental car facility and a big-box retail store have almost nothing in common programmatically, which suggests the practice is organized around client type and delivery rather than around a signature building.

Sectors named include office buildings, government facilities, college campuses, shopping centers and retail, alongside the transit-oriented work.

Front-end services are where the firm positions itself most distinctly. Programming, design criteria and scoping documents, plus feasibility studies and reports, mean it can be engaged before anyone knows what is being built — the stage at which a public agency most often needs help and least often has drawings. Master planning engagements deliberately bring in regulatory agency officials, user groups and community leaders including elected officials, which on a corridor project is less a courtesy than a prerequisite.

Construction management services and strategic workplace environment consulting round out the offering, covering interior, renovation and new-construction scopes within set budget and schedule parameters. For an owner, that means design and delivery oversight can come from the same firm.

The practice describes itself as a diverse team and places community and client stakeholder collaboration on programming, planning and design at the center of how it works.

One office is listed, at 800 S. Figueroa Street, Suite 600 in downtown Los Angeles, reachable at 213.622.4993.