Raleigh Springs Civic Center at night, the town center lit across the lake with the fountain at its middle

Raleigh Springs Civic Center: town center, library, and police station around the lake, Memphis · Photo: Joe Luther

01 — Architecture

Buildings that outlast their origin story

From two hundred schools to the return of the city's most recognizable silhouette, the studio designs buildings meant to be kept: programming, design, documents, and construction administration under one roof.

200+
K-12 schools: 69
Years in practice

What we design

01K-12 educationMore than two hundred school commissions across the Mid-South, drawn for the same school boards the firm serves today.

02Civic & culturalLibraries, community centers, stadium grounds, and the public rooms of the city.

03Adaptive reuse & restorationThe Pyramid, the Harahan Bridge, and the careful return of the buildings we have known the longest.

04Hospitality & retailDestination retail and hotels, including Big Cypress Lodge inside The Pyramid.

05HealthcareClinical and campus work, including Saint Francis Hospital-Bartlett.

06Urban planningDistrict master plans and downtown frameworks, including Downtown Memphis and the Pinch District.

Design philosophy

Modernism is a way of seeing.

Across three generations, modernism has been less a recognizable look than a point of view. A willingness to see life without a filter. We let structure speak instead of disguising it. We seek a natural relationship between a building and its setting, because no work of ours can surpass the architecture already present in nature. The measure is whether what we add can complement it with honesty and grace.

Firmness, commodity, delight.

Vitruvius still offers the clearest standard. Firmness is what allows a building to stand. Commodity is how completely it serves the purpose and people for which it was made. A beautiful structure that fails its client has still failed. Delight begins beyond those essentials: in the surprising surface, the decisive gesture, or the idea that does more than contain an activity and instead awakens the imagination. Structure and purpose are responsibilities. Delight is what carries them into architecture.

Boldness with discipline.

The best solutions often arrive as discoveries: a spine asks to become larger, a hierarchy comes into focus, or an unexpected move resolves the whole. We follow those moments. Boldness matters because it can answer a significant problem with equal conviction, but it must always satisfy the requirements that gave the project its reason for being.

Architecture should be felt.

A building has the power to shape emotion. We want the people inside our work to feel comfortable, happy, inspired. Perhaps even young. That is why we reach for light, color, greenery, openness, and views rather than familiar answers for their own sake. A glass wall is not simply an aesthetic choice; it can connect someone to the beauty outside and make the world feel open.

Why not?

The question took root in the glass house our founder built for his family in 1959, an uncommon way to live at the time. It became an inheritance: Why not approach the problem uniquely? Why not be daring enough to make it different? That conviction reaches beyond form. Architecture can answer a larger cause, and its highest practice is to do what is right, create a positive difference, and leave people and places better than we found them.