When renowned architect Rafael Viñoly died suddenly in 2023, there was no concrete path laid out for the future of his firm, Rafael Viñoly Architects. “My father had a notion of succession planning, but he didn’t get around to it because he was very healthy,” said Román Viñoly, his son, who was a director at the firm at the time.
Losing a founding figure who was vital to the firm’s process left a vacuum. Román told AN that his first goal was to stabilize the firm in the wake of such a traumatic loss. He and the rest of the firm’s leadership realized that if they were to continue his father’s work, they needed to carefully reassess what the practice stood for. From there, they established a set of core guiding principles that would define their future work.
Since Román himself was not an architect, the prospect of his succeeding his father was further complicated. The firm decided to reorganize from a sole proprietorship under Rafael to a collaborative partnership between Román; Jim Herr and Bassam Komati, who were partners at the firm; and Stephanie Tsang, who had been a director. They are supported by a team of directors, who manage the practice’s regional offices and divisions. “Ownership is a process. We started with a certain base condition, and we’re moving towards a different condition,” said Román. The firm is still known as simply “Viñoly,” but Román noted that “A proper rebrand is in our near future. It’s just another one of those things that requires a great deal of time and attention.”
Among U.S. architecture firms with 50 or more employees, 84 percent reported having an ownership transition plan, per the 2024 AIA Firm Survey Report. AN spoke to several firms across the country about succession planning, leadership transitions, ownership models, and the financial considerations behind such decisions. Careful succession planning is necessary for companies that want to achieve longevity—a smooth transition is key to a stable future.
In popular imagination, broaching succession might feel controversial or difficult. It is only natural for founders to feel reluctant to let go of what they have built. However, succession processes are often kept deliberately understated and seldom turn out to be as salacious as the Murdoch estate case or its fictional reimagining in HBO’s Succession. It is also rare for transitions to take place in courtrooms like the dispute between Zaha Hadid Architects and the Zaha Hadid Foundation over the late Iraqi British architect’s estate and the financial relationship between the two entities.
Set Up for Success
Succession planning is a slow process comprising dozens if not hundreds of laborious and tense conversations that take place in boardrooms, gathering spaces, and design studios, and on video calls. Ideally, these conversations involve employees at all levels working with legal consultants and financial advisers. Some transitions can extend for over a decade.
When Robert A. M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) lost its revered founder last November, the firm was already deep into a 15-year leadership transition. Today, RAMSA is structured as “a partnership, and then we have a management committee that’s a small group of partners,” said Daniel Lobitz, a partner at RAMSA and chair of the management committee.
Following the pandemic, Stern reduced his involvement at RAMSA due to health concerns. He was the one who initiated the process of succession planning, and Lobitz attributes this to the late architect’s interest in “cultivating talent and pushing people to be leaders.” RAMSA CEO Lisa Matkovic noted that succession at the firm was “a very deliberate process for us, and we’ve been very focused on it as a continuous process.” She added that the most important aspect “is not the mechanical replacement of people but really spending your time developing the talent so that when the time comes, they’re ready and you’re ready.”
Large firms such as Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), currently celebrating its 50th year, have seen cycles of succession take place, with structures established to facilitate the process for a staff of more than 600. “Transition is planned carefully and evolves gradually by consensus rather than by the sudden introduction of new structures,” said James von Klemperer, the firm’s president. “As a large, global firm, our projects often last decades, and individuals build their careers in our offices, so longevity and stability are key.”
In smaller studios, the process of cultivating leaders can also take decades. At Steven Holl Architects, Dimitra Tsachrelia Holl was recently promoted to a principal alongside her husband, Steven. Three other partners make up the firm’s senior leadership: Roberto Bannura, Noah Yaffe, and Olaf Schmidt. “All of our partners have been with the firm for more than two decades. So, we gradually grow into the positions that we’re in now. It’s all homegrown,” Schmidt told AN. With 25 employees, the practice has largely remained a studio of collaborators (except for a short period when it expanded to 75). “Our way of leadership transition is tested through the work itself. It doesn’t work the other way around, and leadership grows through a sustained involvement in the work,” said Tsachrelia Holl.
Cultivating Talent Through Employee Ownership
Setting employees up for leadership roles means keeping them at a firm for several years. But in a volatile labor market where inflation is creeping upward, unionization movements are often struck down, and firm employment rates are dropping, this is easier said than done. According to a 2025 AIA report, employee turnover rates ranged from 4 percent at small firms to 10 percent at larger ones. An AIA survey in early 2024 showed that 12.7 percent of respondents listed employee retention and compensation expectations as their top concerns for the year, while 16.7 percent were worried about ownership transition issues. To keep staff engaged and satisfied, some firms have looked to a model that gives them more of a stake in the practice’s future: employee ownership.
Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake recently transitioned from a founder-led partnership to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) structure at the start of 2025. The firm—founded in 1984 by Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake—examined multiple models of ownership in its succession planning over several years. In 2023, the firm established a management group with representatives from different practice areas to prepare for the transition. “This evolution was about optimizing for longevity, and an ESOP really supports that,” said Jon McCandlish, who was recently announced as one of two managing directors heading the firm and its management group.
McCandlish noted that it was difficult to strike a balance between engendering a sense of collective ownership and internal transparency while also protecting aspects of the business that had to remain confidential in the planning process.
Another key concern was to preserve the firm’s research-driven culture while setting itself up for future expansion. “The transition structure allowed for flexibility,” said Marilia Rodrigues, who is also a managing director. “So it was less ‘We’re this size, and this is appropriate for the firm.’ We wanted to be able to operate at a level where we are today but also to operate efficiently and effectively at a larger scale.”
BNIM—a firm founded in 1970 in Kansas City—also transitioned to an ESOP model on paper in October 2023. After setting up an ESOP committee the following year, the firm commenced an 18-month practice transformation process in January 2025. BNIM sought guidance from Apostrophe Consulting, which conducted workshops with staff members and created six working groups to identify key roles and divide responsibilities. The groups were “made up of employee-owners across the office and cofacilitated by principals,” said Beena Ramaswami, BNIM’s director of brand identity. “The groups were design delivery, practice advancement, shared services, central circle, employee-owners group, and the board of directors. Each group had at least six members, with others brought in as specialists for certain sessions.”
Setting up a structure to cultivate leaders over time was one of the succession-planning goals that sparked the transition to an ESOP, explained Katie Nichols, a principal at BNIM. “One of the things we have focused on is understanding the roles that are essential for our practice to be effective and impactful, and structuring the model around them,” she said. Carleigh Pope, an associate at BNIM and the company’s ESOP Committee Co-Chair, told AN that the firm’s employees initially had questions about how the distributed leadership model would work in practice. It took a lot of conversations to instill a collective belief that the process needed “to be put into practice before we could fully see that it worked,” she said.
During the transition, the firm’s leadership realized that financial transparency and education were key to ensuring that employee-owners remained aware of the impact business decisions would have on the company. “It’s part of a broader shift happening across the industry. People today have a clearer set of expectations around the workplace,” James Pfeiffer, a principal at BNIM, told AN. “They value transparency, equity, and a strong sense of shared purpose in the work we do.”
Consolidated Futures
There were five architecture and engineering firms listed among the top 100 largest employee-owned enterprises in the U.S. as of last year. This included firms like Gensler and HDR, with around 4,000 and 15,000 employees, respectively. Compared with how only 25 percent of the architecture firms in the U.S. have more than 10 employees, such organizations are industry outliers.
One firm operating at this scale is Perkins&Will, a global practice with more than 2,600 employees. Over the years, it has acquired several smaller practices, including Washington, D.C.–based interior architecture firm HYL in 2024. This acquisition emerged from a succession-planning process where HYL’s sole owner and founder and CEO, Catherine Heath, worked with a consultant to find avenues to scale up her studio and pursue larger projects. “I knew that some of my team members would be excited about working on other project types that I wasn’t going to be able to offer them. Unless I acquired somebody else, I wasn’t going to be able to get into those other marketplaces,” Heath told AN. The merger was a logical step forward for Heath and HYL, since the firm only had about 30 employees at the time. All of her architectural staff came over to the new firm, and none of her employees have resigned since the merger, although some administrative staff did not join Perkins&Will, due to an overlap in roles.
Heath credits the relatively smooth transition to her past experience working on multimillion-square-foot projects at large firms and the time she spent evaluating each employee’s prospects at Perkins&Will. “I actually spent a tremendous amount of time with HR, going through how we were going to make this work for each and every team member. I reviewed where they were going to land and what their role would be,” explained Heath. She said she assessed compensation, benefits, parity, and the individual interests of her staff to make the transition as beneficial as possible for them. Phil Harrison, CEO of Perkins&Will, told AN that one thing they wanted to make clear in the merger was that HYL staffers would not lose their autonomy or decision-making authority. “I think convincing people that this future vision was going to be real was probably the biggest challenge,” he said. “Our culture is very much based on delegated authority and empowering leaders.”
More recently, in late April, CannonDesign, another large firm with offices across the world, announced its acquisition of Ennead Architects. The latter firm will function as a distinct studio within CannonDesign, a multidisciplinary practice with more than 1,600 employees and offices all over the U.S. and other parts of the world. The merger is the latest in a series that includes CannonDesign’s acquisitions of SRG Partnership, FKP Architects, and gkkworks, among others. Brad Lukanic, CannonDesign’s CEO, explained that each acquisition was planned with the aim of “trying to complement and build out where we see an opportunity to help clients even more.” He added that Ennead’s prowess in the health, education, and cultural sectors was key to the merger.
Ennead’s partners were also made owners in CannonDesign during the acquisition. “About a third of our employees are owners. So we had made a commitment to do a more distributed ownership model,” Lukanic told AN. He mentioned that it took a year to finalize the acquisition. The firm is currently working on strategies to integrate its work processes, which will likely take another 9 to 12 months, explained Lukanic. He noted that connecting with people is vital to the success of any merger, and a major concern throughout each acquisition process was considering how to “continue to deliver design excellence and make sure that design is at the center of all the work and not lost as you scale up in an organization.”
A Living Legacy
In smaller firms, succession can happen through buyouts between partners, like in the case of Boston-based Machado Silvetti, where design principals Stephanie Randazzo Dwyer and Jeffry Burchard took over after the founding partners retired. Both Randazzo Dwyer and Burchard have been at the firm for more than 20 years. In 2016, they broached the topic of succession with Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti. Burchard mentioned that timing was key to the transition. Other partners had started conversations in the past, but the founders were not ready to move on at that time. “It was a 10-year conversation, a very long, open, and communicative one, but they were certainly more open to it towards the last five years,” said Randazzo Dwyer.
Burchard and Randazzo Dwyer were initially minority stock owners in the firm. Their transition agreement incorporated a plan for the founders to transfer ownership to them as their stakes vested over time. “This is a real challenge, because employees of architecture firms don’t usually have the capacity to amass a purchase price or cash to outright purchase stock,” Burchard said. He noted that this structure allows the founders to benefit from the firm’s work for a time, but there is a term limit to this as well.
The duo also chose to retain the name Machado Silvetti to signify their own role in the firm’s legacy and its studio culture. “I think in the end, we wanted to build on Machado Silvetti,” Randazzo Dwyer said. Nearly all the firms interviewed evaluated name changes or soft rebrandings (like RAMSA and Viñoly) during their succession planning. Most decided to stick with the brand or tweak it ever so slightly. “Name has recognition, and part of the motivation for any new partner or principal to buy into or take over the responsibility of a legacy firm is the legacy of that firm,” said Burchard.
Jerry Elengical is a journalist who has covered art, design, real estate, and politics for The Architect’s Newspaper, The New York Times, STIRworld, The Intercept, and City Limits.