Firm

WHAT WE DO

We explore and design inventive solutions to complex projects that better our clients’ everyday life, our community, and our world.
Our clients are leaders in their respective industries. We partner with them to bring the latest thought leadership to each project, and to deliver buildings, spaces and places that advance their mission. Our diverse group of professionals take that responsibility seriously. As their trusted advisors and stewards of responsible design, we are always looking for opportunities that enable us to make a positive impact.

WHY WE DO IT

Our vision is to design places that elevate the human experience; our goal is to build a design culture that can transform the most common buildings and landscapes into meaningful experiences.
We believe that great design emerges from a visionary response to an everyday need. The places we design are used by people in all walks of life, yet each design must reach beyond the ordinary. Our collective journey requires that we challenge ourselves to ask the right questions and search for the right responses. We nurture a work culture that values and cultivates these ideas.

HOW WE DO IT

We bring together research, creativity, and technology through a rigorous process to create places where people live, learn, heal, work, and play.
Design is an iterative and interactive process that works best when ideas are measured, discussed and challenged. Our process is informed by a deep understanding of the program, the site, and the science of buildings, but it starts with the need to discover a project’s full potential. Our expertise, knowledge and resources are most effective when we listen to one another, work with one another, and learn from one another.

WHAT WE VALUE

Our studios bring people together in a cooperative effort to advance the course of the built environment. These are some of the things that are important to us:

Culture

We are committed to creating a studio culture that fosters professionalism, creativity, positive energy, and mutual respect. When our people are equipped to work at their fullest potential, we can live out and realize our philosophy of “innovation through partnership.” By intentionally focusing on career paths and professional development, we not only serve our clients and deliver excellence, we build our own future.

Design has the power to unite communities and to shape where we live, learn, heal, work, and play. Convinced of this, we encourage our employees to participate in firm-wide team building events and to serve within their respective communities. We sponsor a wide range of team building events.
Service-related or developmental activities include Canstruction, Dragon Boat racing, Bring Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day, assisting the Community Design Collaborative, and contributing to events that support community-based or client-based charities.

Viewpoint

Integrated Design

Our common vision is to transform every day buildings and landscapes into meaningful experiences.

As a team of planners, architects, interior designers, and engineers, we are focused on the identification and realization of innovative solutions. Far more than coordinating multiple teams in separate offices, we work as interactive participants throughout a collaborative and integrated process. Each of us supports the other with disciplined, real-time thinking towards the betterment of the project.

In the context of increasingly complex building programs and bound by demanding technological and environmental goals, our integrated design provides our clients with places and spaces where the whole of the built environment is greater than the sum of its component systems.

Sustainability

We believe that human wellness depends on the health of the environment that surrounds us. Starting from this value-based foundation, we strive to create spaces and places that allow people and nature to thrive.

This approach provides opportunity at every decision – from an individual material selected for positive impact on people and planet, to building performance for passive cooling, to whole campus district energy systems. Our success is based on shared values with our clients and a close collaboration among architects, interior designers, and engineers – tapping the expertise and passions of each person on the team.

We design upon this foundation of values and collaboration to enrich the lives of those who engage the buildings and spaces we help to shape. This architecture fosters community, supports long-term ecological balance, and provides for future generations.

Design Process

With common goals to elevate the human experience and better our environment, we cultivate a process that reinvents programs as our culture evolves, reconnects humans to their environment by remaking building sites, and utilizes emerging building technologies. This process weaves these three drivers into visionary built narratives that respond to our clients’ needs and exceed their user’s expectations, allowing even the simplest built environment to elevate the human spirit.

The process is rigorous, creative, and interactive, incorporating research and the latest design technologies as a bridge to our client’s thoughts and aspirations. We believe that the most important element in this creative process is conversation with our clients. For us, this is the beginning of our design process. Our clients’ knowledge of their needs and our knowledge of their building typologies provides the foundation for visionary solutions.

To provide real time thinking and solutions, our process is collaborative, allowing multiple disciplines to contribute to the entire process. This allows each discipline to contribute in a manner that elevates each other’s contribution. This process also ensures that the experience of senior team members informs the innovation emerging from the energy of those who just entered the profession.

To promote creativity and aspirational goals, we invest our time and resources early in the process to explore the potential of each project. Once we arrive at an ideal solution, this integrated team remains intact throughout the delivery of the project so that in the latter stages of the design process, the changing scales and increasing details express and elevate the design solution.

Our commitment to quality and creativity is supported through design pinups and reviews to ensure that each project reaches its greatest potential. These reviews and pinups contribute to projects that are executed impeccably and fully coordinated. Our rigorous quality assurance process guarantees our clients that the construction process is flawless and the performance of the building is outstanding.

Design Research

As partners in the design process, we recognize the power of asking questions, listening carefully, thinking systematically, testing ideas, and measuring results.  From the pre-design process through post-occupancy, we provide research and analytics as a resource to our clients and colleagues to uncover hidden value and discover impactful solutions to their design needs.

Systematic study at critical stages of the design process leads to better and more robust designs. In planning and pre-design, we shadow and observe current operations, explore historical data to spot trends, verify program assumptions, and engage with stakeholders to find opportunities. During design, we test options against measures of success using simulation modeling to predict and visualize our designs. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we regularly conduct post-occupancy studies on our completed projects and share those learnings.

Our multi-disciplinary research team applies a customized mix of tools, processes, and thinking from complementary fields – including design & architectural research, Lean process improvement, systems science, and operations research. Our DOTT® design research app was developed in-house and allows the team to visualize the behavioral impact of facility design, map workflows, understand utilization and patterns of use.

At EwingCole we are committed to embracing and sharing our design research, and regularly seek opportunities to publish or present our research at national conferences. Our research process is rigorous, creative, and interactive and supports real-time thinking and solutions.

Awards

EwingCole is always grateful to receive recognition for the design we provide our clients. We see it as a testament to the dedication and hard work of our project teams. In the last five years, EwingCole has received over 100 awards from professional organizations including the American Institute of Architects, the International Interior Design Association, and the Illuminating Engineering Society as well as leading industry publications.

Contact

With offices in Charlotte, Irvine, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh EwingCole offers a multi-discipline practice built on the core values of professional excellence, design quality, and collaboration.

Philadelphia, PA

Irvine, CA

New York, NY

Pittsburgh, PA

Charlotte, NC

Raleigh, NC