<h2>About SHoP Architects</h2>
<p>SHoP Architects is a New York-based design practice working from 233 Broadway in Lower Manhattan. The studio is one hundred percent employee-owned, an ownership structure that is still rare among design firms of its profile, and it has completed projects on five continents. Its stated position is direct: evocative, high-performance design can be delivered within real-world constraints of budget, schedule and construction logic.</p>
<h2>What SHoP Does</h2>
<p>The practice covers architecture, interiors, urban design and product-scale design, but its defining characteristic is how deeply it engages with how buildings actually get made. Rather than treating construction as someone else's problem, SHoP invests in fabrication logic, supply chains and assembly sequencing as design material.</p>
<h3>Core Capabilities</h3>
<ul>
<li>Architecture for towers, institutional, civic and cultural buildings</li>
<li>Urban design and waterfront masterplanning</li>
<li>Interior design and workplace environments</li>
<li>Computational and parametric design</li>
<li>Digital fabrication, including an in-house industrial robot</li>
<li>Design for manufacture and assembly on complex facades</li>
</ul>
<h2>Notable Projects</h2>
<p>SHoP's portfolio spans an unusually wide range of building types and scales.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>The Brooklyn Tower and 111 West 57th</strong> - supertall residential towers that pushed slenderness and facade craft in New York</li>
<li><strong>Barclays Center</strong> - the Brooklyn arena whose weathered steel skin became a neighbourhood landmark</li>
<li><strong>Pier 17 and East River Waterfront</strong> - public realm and mixed-use projects reconnecting Manhattan to its edges</li>
<li><strong>Uber HQ, YouTube HQ, Atlassian Central and Midtown Center</strong> - large workplace projects for technology and corporate clients</li>
<li><strong>US Embassy Bangkok, US Consulate General Milan and US Embassy Tegucigalpa</strong> - diplomatic facilities with demanding security and representational requirements</li>
<li><strong>Fulbright University Vietnam and the Joyce F. Brown Academic Building</strong> - higher education campuses and buildings</li>
<li><strong>Gotham FC Training Facility and Nassau Coliseum</strong> - sports and entertainment venues</li>
</ul>
<h2>Technology and Fabrication</h2>
<p>Technology at SHoP is applied rather than decorative. Parametric modelling, custom scripting and robotic fabrication are used to make complex geometry buildable and affordable - most visibly on facades where thousands of unique panels must be documented, procured and installed without error. The studio's single industrial robot is a deliberate statement about testing ideas physically before they reach a factory.</p>
<h2>Employee Ownership and Culture</h2>
<p>Full employee ownership aligns long-term thinking with day-to-day decisions and shapes how the studio invests in its people. SHoP U, an internal education programme offering more than a hundred courses, reflects a commitment to developing technical depth in-house rather than relying solely on external hires.</p>
<h2>Market Position</h2>
<p>SHoP occupies a distinctive place between design-led practice and technical innovator. It competes for the same high-profile commissions as the largest global firms, but differentiates itself through construction intelligence, computational capability and a willingness to take responsibility for how a design is realised.</p>
<h2>Why AEC Teams Follow SHoP</h2>
<p>For architects, engineers and contractors interested in digital fabrication, complex facades and design-for-manufacture, SHoP is one of the most instructive practices to study across the built environment.</p>
<h2>Sectors Served</h2>
<p>Work is spread across residential and supertall towers, workplace and corporate headquarters, sports and entertainment venues, higher education, diplomatic and federal facilities, transport infrastructure such as the LaGuardia master plan, and public waterfront and civic projects. That mix means the studio moves regularly between private developer clients, institutional owners and government agencies, each with very different procurement rules and approval cycles.</p>
<h2>Working Method</h2>
<p>Projects typically begin with an interrogation of the constraints - zoning envelope, structural system, facade budget, construction access - and treat those limits as the starting material for the design rather than obstacles to be argued away later. It is a pragmatic approach that helps explain how such visually ambitious buildings reach completion.</p>

SHoP Architects is an employee-owned New York practice behind supertall towers, arenas, embassies and waterfronts, combining design with digital fabrication exp

SHoP Architects | New York Design & Fabrication Studio

SHoP Architects

SHoP Architects is a 100% employee-owned New York design practice known for supertall towers, arenas, embassies, academic buildings and public waterfronts, pairing ambitious architecture with digital fabrication, robotics and rigorous delivery expertise.

<h2>About Thornton Tomasetti</h2>
<p>Thornton Tomasetti is an international engineering firm founded in 1949 and headquartered at 120 Broadway in New York City. Employee-owned and privately held, it employs more than 1,500 people across over 50 offices in North America, the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, and has delivered projects in more than 50 countries.</p>
<p>The firm's stated purpose is optimising the design and performance of structures, materials and systems for projects of every size and level of complexity - a scope that spans the entire life cycle of a building, from early concept through construction, occupation, adaptation and, when necessary, investigation after failure.</p>
<h2>Practice Areas</h2>
<h3>Building Structure</h3>
<p>The practice on which the firm's reputation was built. Thornton Tomasetti has engineered many of the world's tallest and most structurally demanding buildings, alongside stadiums, transport hubs, cultural venues and complex commercial developments.</p>
<h3>Building Skin</h3>
<p>Facade engineering covering curtain wall design, cladding systems, glazing performance, weatherproofing and the thermal and structural behaviour of the building envelope - increasingly the most technically demanding element of a modern building.</p>
<h3>Building Performance</h3>
<p>Analysis of how a completed building actually behaves: energy modelling, daylighting, thermal comfort, acoustics and computational simulation used to test design decisions before they are built.</p>
<h3>Construction Support Services</h3>
<p>Assistance during delivery, including constructibility review, connection design, temporary works, erection engineering and support for contractors managing complex structural sequences on site.</p>
<h3>Property Loss Consulting</h3>
<p>Forensic engineering and failure investigation - determining why structures fail, supporting insurance and legal proceedings, and advising on repair and reinstatement. Few firms combine original design capability with forensic expertise at this scale, and each discipline informs the other.</p>
<h3>Sustainability</h3>
<p>Embodied carbon assessment, low-carbon structural design, material efficiency, resilience planning and certification support. Structural engineering carries a disproportionate share of a building's embodied carbon, which puts this practice at the centre of meaningful decarbonisation.</p>
<h2>Technology and Research</h2>
<p>Thornton Tomasetti has been unusually active in developing its own computational tools, with an in-house research and applied technology group producing software for structural optimisation, parametric design and data-driven engineering. Several of these tools have been released to the wider AEC community rather than kept proprietary.</p>
<h2>Sectors Served</h2>
<ul>
<li>Tall buildings and high-rise commercial development</li>
<li>Sports venues and stadiums</li>
<li>Aviation and transportation infrastructure</li>
<li>Healthcare and science facilities</li>
<li>Higher education and cultural buildings</li>
<li>Residential and mixed-use development</li>
<li>Industrial and energy structures</li>
<li>Historic renovation and adaptive reuse</li>
</ul>
<h2>Market Position</h2>
<p>Thornton Tomasetti sits among the most recognised structural engineering consultancies globally, particularly for technically ambitious projects where conventional solutions do not apply. Its own tagline captures the positioning directly: when others say no, the firm says here's how. Employee ownership gives it a degree of independence in how it invests in research and long-term capability that publicly traded competitors do not always have.</p>
<h2>Working With Thornton Tomasetti</h2>
<p>Typical clients include architects, developers, contractors, institutions, government agencies and insurers. For architects pursuing structurally complex forms, and for owners dealing with facade performance or building failure, the firm is one of the principal engineering consultancies to know across the global AEC industry.</p>

Thornton Tomasetti is a global engineering firm covering building structure, facades, performance, sustainability, construction support and forensic investigati

Thornton Tomasetti | Structural & Facade Engineers

Thornton Tomasetti

Thornton Tomasetti is a global engineering firm of 1,500+ people optimising structures, facades, building performance and sustainability, with construction support and forensic services across more than 50 countries.

These large-scale pavilions form an immersive entry environment to the 2016 Design Miami Exhibition. After SHoP Architects was awarded the 2016 Design Miami Visionary Award with an invitation to design the entry, the firm quickly reached out to Branch Technology to develop a design concept that leveraged large-scale 3D printing. Read more at: https://www.branch.technology/projects-1/2017/6/9/shop

Design Miami Pavilions

We are a prefabrication and technology company that specializes in large-scale 3D printing. Branch Technology offers a patented 3D printing process called Cellular Fabrication, C-Fab®. This unique printing method allows material to solidify in open space, creating a matrix of polymer in virtually any shape.<br /><br />We are a construction and technology company that is inspired by nature. We use its teachings to build sustainably and efficiently through the development of hardware, software, pre-fabrication innovations, and solution-driven products.

Design Miami Pavilions

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