LHB is an architecture and engineering firm that has worked across the Upper Midwest since 1966. Its contact page lists four offices: Duluth, Minneapolis and Cambridge in Minnesota, plus Superior, Wisconsin. The practice covers bridges and structures, roads, housing, education, government buildings, mining and heavy manufacturing, with in-house architects, structural, civil, mechanical and electrical engineers, surveyors and historic preservation staff. LHB was lead design engineer on the Stone Arch Bridge Rehabilitation in Minneapolis. It inspected the 1883 railroad bridge for MnDOT in 2017, then assembled the subconsultant team in 2019 and produced the preservation plans. The firm says crews replaced 500 tons of deteriorated stone before the bridge reopened in July 2025.
Thirteen service lines are published, and the four that are not architecture or core engineering say the most about how this practice is put together.
Climate action planning and research is one. That is work done before a building is designed, or instead of designing one – a city or a utility asking what to do rather than what to draw. Few architecture and engineering firms carry it as a billable service line.
Historic preservation is the second, and it is the thread that leads to the Stone Arch Bridge work described above. Preservation is a different discipline from restoration or repair: the question is what can be changed and what must be kept, and answering it requires someone who knows the documentation standards as well as the structure.
Land surveying is the third. Having surveyors in-house on a bridge or road job removes a handoff that routinely causes problems, because the survey is the basis every other drawing depends on.
Contract staffing is the fourth and the most unusual – LHB will place its own technical people inside a client’s organisation rather than only taking work in-house. For an agency short of licensed engineers, that is a different kind of help than a design contract.
The rest of the list covers architecture, interior design, planning and urban design, civil, structural, mechanical, electrical and environmental engineering, and landscape architecture.
The four offices come with addresses worth having: 21 W Superior Street, Suite 500 in Duluth; 701 Washington Avenue N, Suite 200 in Minneapolis; 324 Garfield Street S in Cambridge; and 63 E Second Street, Suite 150 in Superior, Wisconsin. Duluth and Superior sit across the harbour from one another, which is a sensible footprint for a firm whose work follows the lake, the ore docks and the heavy industry around them.
AIA Minnesota gave LHB its 2021 Firm Award for contributions to the profession. The firm also publishes an employee states of licensure document, which is the practical thing to ask for when a project crosses a state line.
The Duluth office is on 218-727-8446.
