BR+A Consulting Engineers

BR+A Consulting Engineers is a Boston-headquartered MEP and technology engineering firm with offices in Charleston, Charlotte, Chicago, Denver, Houston and other US cities. The practice concentrates on healthcare, life sciences, higher education and mission-critical work, where mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection design carries most of the technical risk. BR+A is the MEP engineer on the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Virginia, a $350 million building that puts cell therapy, gene therapy and advanced manufacturing suites in the same structure as open research labs. That adjacency, with cleanroom pressure cascades and vibration criteria running against research-floor flexibility, is the kind of coordination problem the firm is built around.

Three engineers, Gene Bard, Arjun Rao and Ted Athanas, started the firm in Boston in 1975 with eleven MEP designers. Fifty years on it has more than 500 employees and is still employee-owned, which in a consulting practice tends to show up as low partner turnover rather than as anything a client sees directly.

One specialism sets the practice apart from other MEP firms of its size. BR+A has spent more than twenty years engineering particle therapy facilities and has designed over three million square feet of proton therapy space. Proton therapy vaults are among the most demanding rooms in any building. The equipment weighs in the hundreds of tonnes, shielding is measured in metres of concrete, and the mechanical and electrical systems have to serve a cyclotron and a clinical patient area inside the same envelope.

The wider project list reflects a similar appetite for technically difficult buildings. MIT.nano and Lafayette College’s Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center have both won AIA COTE Top Ten awards, which are given for measured environmental performance rather than appearance, a category where the engineer’s contribution is most of the result. On Penn Medicine’s Pavilion the firm worked inside an integrated project delivery team, sharing risk with the owner and builder under a single multi-party contract.

Services run past mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection to commissioning, sustainability consulting, infrastructure design, master planning, and technology and security design. Lighting design is kept in-house as a named studio, Borealis.

Markets are academic, corporate, healthcare, infrastructure, and science and technology, and the project footprint reaches from Houston to Oxford and Boston to Bangkok.