HGA

About HGA

HGA is a national interdisciplinary design firm rooted in architecture and engineering. The practice believes that the best design results from deep insight into the people and passions that animate each unique environment.

With 1,200 people in offices from coast to coast, HGA works to make a positive, lasting impact for clients in healthcare, arts and culture, community, corporate, education, government, science and technology, and energy markets. The firm has more than 70 years of experience as an interdisciplinary design practice.

Research-Based Approach

HGA employs a holistic, research-based approach to design. Its work is always built upon a foundation of deep, penetrating insight into client needs, fuelled by empathy, curiosity, and a resolve to deliver the extraordinary. The firm is driven to understand broad social and technological developments and market-specific challenges, and to delve deeply into its clients' organisations.

In addition to the insight from its design teams, HGA maintains a collective of in-house specialists - process engineers, design thinking specialists, evidence-based researchers, and others - who work together to understand what is critical to the quality of clients' work, and thus to its own.

Research is foundational to the firm's work and philosophy. It is the link between the curiosity that propels the practice to dig deeper and the knowledge that enables it to help clients and communities thrive. The scope is broad, from the innovations that will drive clients' future business to the technological and social changes that enable unique design solutions. HGA also learns from individual projects by leveraging technology, data collection and ethnography, informing the next project and translating into the next idea.

Integrated Multidisciplinary Delivery

As a multidisciplinary firm, HGA is adept at working together to create holistic solutions. Its team-based process encourages vital knowledge sharing, allowing the diversity of a project's needs to be integrated early on. This results in a more powerful, efficient process, a better design experience, and a higher-performing, more purposeful and more enduring solution.

Delivery Expertise by Market

• Healthcare - national leaders in Lean and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)
• Higher education - significant success in design-build projects
• Workplace - strong relationships with the developers who lead these projects

Regardless of process, early involvement of owners, design teams, contractors and users is paramount to developing solutions suited to each client. Lean and IPD in particular depend on that early alignment, because the commercial structure only produces savings if the parties are contractually engaged before design decisions harden.

Digital Practice and Technology

Technology elevates HGA's understanding of decisions made during the design phase and the ultimate impact they have on the built environment. The firm has long been a leader in BIM, computation, visualisation and fabrication, and continues to innovate by developing new technologies to explore and analyse building information - and to build empathy for those who inhabit the spaces it designs.

Its Digital Practice Group is committed to pioneering technology and is a trailblazer in implementation.

Sustainability

Sustainability is at the heart of HGA's holistic design approach. The firm aims for every project to be a commitment to a healthier planet, incorporating decarbonisation, healthy communities and climate adaptation goals.

Teams collaborate across disciplines to consider environmental impact and resilience, setting ambitious yet achievable goals. High-performance projects, industry commitments and collected metrics provide the evidence base: the firm has the knowledge and tools to design for both mitigation and adaptation.

Equity and Community Action

Equity is a living part of HGA - woven into its culture and reflected in its work, people and strategy. The firm holds that great design is equitable design: fuelled by curiosity, informed by diverse perspectives, and elevated by insight directly from those who inhabit its spaces.

Its Community Action programme makes design accessible to nonprofits and community organisations that lack access to professional services.

Markets Served

• Healthcare
• Arts and culture
• Community and civic
• Corporate and workplace
• Education
• Government
• Science and technology
• Energy