CO Architects

About CO Architects

CO Architects is a Los Angeles-based architecture practice founded in 1986, working nationally on healthcare, medical and health sciences education, higher education, science and technology, and civic projects. Over more than three decades the firm has completed work in 29 states and the United Kingdom, and it received the American Institute of Architects California Council's California Architecture Firm of the Year award in 2014.

The name is deliberate. CO is a prefix meaning together with, jointly, equally, and the practice organises itself around that idea: design, technical systems, planning, documentation and project management treated as complementary roles within a single team rather than sequential handovers between departments.

Services

• Architectural design – building design across all of the firm's sectors.
• Programming – establishing space needs and functional requirements before design begins.
• Comprehensive planning – campus and facility-wide planning.
• Facility evaluation – assessment of existing buildings and estates.
• Laboratory planning – specialist planning for research and teaching laboratories.
• Medical planning – clinical adjacency and workflow planning for hospitals and health facilities.
• Technical systems, documentation and project management – delivery capability carried in house.

Laboratory and medical planning are the capabilities that distinguish the practice. Both are specialisms that many architecture firms subcontract, and holding them internally lets CO shape clinical and research workflows at the same time as the building envelope.

Sectors and Projects

Healthcare

CO Architects designs hospitals and clinical facilities on healthcare and academic campuses. UCI Health in Irvine, a 350,000 square foot acute care hospital that opened in December 2025, is the first all-electric acute care hospital in the United States. Kaiser Permanente San Diego Medical Center was the first hospital in the world to achieve Double LEED Platinum certification.

Medical and Health Sciences Education

The practice has completed transformative buildings for schools of medicine and the health professions. The Charles R. Drew University Health Professions Education Building is an interprofessional training facility incorporating a simulation centre, clinical skills suite, plastinated and virtual anatomy labs, a virtual skills and haptics lab, robotic surgery training and a makerspace.

Science and Technology

CO specialises in advanced, high-performance laboratories for collaborative research, teaching and development. Completed and current work includes the Phoenix Biomedical Sciences Partnership Building, the Caltech Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies and the Caltech Painter Quantum Computing Laboratory, the Autry C. Stephens Engineering Discovery Building at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania Physical Sciences Building, the Salk Institute East Building, Tata Hall for the Sciences at UC San Diego, engineering buildings at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Washington, the Kendall Square Laboratory Building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation Erwin Building.

Design Approach

Every CO project is organised around a Big Idea: the physical representation of that project's specific vision and goals. Supporting principles include creating an individual expression, supporting flexible space use, striving for universal access, encouraging movement, promoting interaction, fostering wellness, harnessing daylight, reflecting the context and designing for the environment.

The firm frames its priority as the people who need its buildings to perform. Students and surgeons, faculty and facilities maintenance staff, patients and physicians all appear in how CO describes its user focus, and design is presented as an iterative process of discovery worked through with clients, consultants and builders.

Sustainability

CO treats environmental stewardship as part of the design process rather than an addition to it. The stated approach favours passive, commonsense solutions first, followed by active systems-based measures, with the aim of low energy and water use. The firm works to minimise the carbon footprint of new construction and, where possible, to revitalise existing structures to extend their lives and conserve resources.

Its assessment covers socio-cultural implications, functional aspects, economic considerations, procedural efficiencies and full life cycle including embodied energy in materials. The practice states a preference for durable rather than replaceable technologies that add value over time instead of delivering only short-term savings.

Culture and Leadership

The CO Mindset covers five commitments: ambitious vision with meticulous detail, design thinking in everything, continuous improvement, a people-powered and people-centred organisation, and practice in perpetuity. That last point reflects a firm structured for succession, with leadership transitions planned so the practice outlasts individual contributions. Principals include Andrew Labov, James Simeo and Jenna Knudsen, all FAIA and LEED accredited.

Why CO Architects Matters to the AEC Industry

For anyone working on hospitals, teaching laboratories or medical education buildings, CO Architects is a reference practice. Its all-electric hospital at UCI Health and Double LEED Platinum work at Kaiser Permanente show that decarbonisation is achievable in the most energy-intensive building type there is, which has direct implications for health systems planning capital projects. Its laboratory portfolio, spanning quantum computing, autonomous systems, space solar power and biomedical research, is also a useful survey of how research building requirements are changing.