Brown + Kubican is a structural engineering firm that Dan Kubican and Craig Brown founded in 2000. It’s based in Lexington, Kentucky, with offices in Louisville and Chattanooga, Tennessee. The firm counts 55 staff, 28 of them professional engineers, more than 5,000 completed projects and licenses in 31 states and territories. Beyond new-building design for healthcare, education, commercial and residential clients, it does renovation and adaptive reuse, forensic investigation, and contractor-side work such as shoring and bracing design. On the Kentucky State Capitol Renovation in Frankfort, ENR lists Brown + Kubican as structural engineer alongside architect Champlin/EOP and construction manager Messer Construction. The budget is $291.5 million.
The licensing footprint is the thing to look at
For a 55-person firm working out of Lexington, the state-by-state licence list is the detail that changes how you read this practice. Brown + Kubican publishes all 31 jurisdictions on its about page: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the US Virgin Islands at St. Croix. That is a firm set up to follow repeat clients across the country rather than one bound to a regional market, and it explains how a Kentucky practice ends up on national programmes.
Delivery methods and who the client is
The firm lists four delivery routes it works under — fast-track, design-bid-build, design-build and public-private partnership — and frames the choice as whatever best serves the owner. That is worth pairing with the other half of its practice: alongside design for owners and architects, it provides component design and construction engineering, which is the contractor-side work. Shoring and bracing fall in that category, and it means the firm can sit on either side of a project.
Market experience is listed broadly: healthcare, educational, institutional, recreational, commercial, hospitality, industrial, religious and residential. The firm says it is equally at home in renovation, renewal and adaptive reuse as in new construction, and that its analysis and modelling run on structural analysis and BIM software for buildings of any type, size and material system.
The team composition behind the headline number
The 55-person figure includes 28 professional engineers, which the firm says makes it the largest Kentucky-based structural engineering firm in the state. Beyond the PEs, the published team breakdown names engineers-in-training, BIM and CAD technicians, and dedicated support staff — a mix that tells you drafting and modelling are kept in-house rather than outsourced.
Three offices are listed, across two states: Lexington, Louisville and Chattanooga. The practice is organised around five stated principles and a mission framed as design solutions that optimise structural performance while holding cost and resource efficiency, with the firm’s stated purpose being to empower and inspire.
Dan Kubican, PE and Craig Brown, PE founded the firm in 2000, and it operates as Brown & Kubican, PSC. It maintains Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X accounts, all linked from its own site.
