TBG Partners

TBG Partners is a Texas landscape architecture, urban design and planning firm with offices in Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Business profiles list Austin as its headquarters and 1987 as its founding year, and the firm describes nearly 40 years of practice. It also designs branded environments, working for public and private clients on parks, plazas, campuses, mixed-use districts and residential communities. Recent work includes the Pearl master plan in San Antonio and the Loop plaza in downtown Dallas, which is set to tie together three trails for cyclists. Bisnow’s sponsor profile puts its staff above 120. TBG is the landscape architect for 5550 LBJ, High Street Residential’s 435-unit mixed-income apartment project in North Dallas, where the amenities include a resort-style pool and a seventh-floor sky lounge.

The firm’s first commission was not a plaza or a corporate campus. It was the landscape design for a sea lion exhibit at the Houston Zoo.

Earl Broussard and Tom Afflerbach started the practice in 1987 out of a spare bedroom in Broussard’s Austin house, under the name The Broussard Group. Bird, alligator and penguin exhibits followed the sea lions, and within a year the office had moved into high-tech corporate campus work. A Houston studio opened roughly three years in, around 1990. By the firm’s 35th-anniversary post in 2022 the staff count had reached about 120, and the current people page carries 25 individuals at principal level, co-founder Broussard and Bill Odle among them.

Four service lines sit under the TBG name: landscape architecture, urban design, planning, and a Branded Environments practice that treats outdoor space as a carrier of a client’s identity rather than as decoration around a building. The urban design work reaches past planting plans into buildings, public space, transportation and natural systems. Planning is framed as assessing and managing land resources, balancing environmental, social and economic factors against growth pressure.

TBG describes its process as putting disciplines in the room at the same time instead of handing work down a chain, and describes its designers as translators fluent across architecture, ecology, engineering and human experience. The stated values are short: authentic, inquisitive, inclusive.

Featured work on the firm’s own site runs across the state. The Pearl Master Plan and Main Plaza in San Antonio, Waterline in Austin, The Loop Plaza in Dallas, and The Gessner Center in Kemah are the projects it leads with.

All four studios are in Texas, each with its own address and phone line: Austin on East Cesar Chavez Street, Dallas on Bryan Street, Houston on West Loop South, and San Antonio on McCullough Avenue. A project anywhere in the state can be staffed from one of them.