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NBBJ

In 1943, four Seattle architects Floyd Naramore, William Bain, Clifton Brady and Perry Johanson joined forces to design a major naval shipyard in Bremerton. The partnership, prompted by the government's wartime needs, combined the talents of specialists in three specific building types: housing, health care and education.

Naramore, Brady, Johanson, Bain
Floyd Naramore, Clifton Brady, Perry Johanson and William Bain Sr. - the founders of NBBJ.
During the last 55 years, NBBJ has grown in size and in the quality of its work, while remaining a leader in the design industry developing a national and international practice. NBBJ is the second largest architectural firm in the United States and fifth largest in the world, employing more than 900 people in six U.S. cities: Seattle, Columbus, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Research Triangle Park and international offices in Tokyo, Japan and Oslo.

Naramore, the oldest partner and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, was the Portland's school architect in 1912.

Brady was an architect and engineer.

In 1934, Johanson graduated first in his class from the University of Washington College of Architecture. Johanson's uncle was chief of staff at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, and it is through this connection that the firm's first small commissions in the health care field began to materialize.

Bain was the son of a Scottish contractor who had come from Canada to Seattle. Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, he worked in Boston and New York and later in Los Angeles. Through his apprenticeships with well-known architects, he became proficient in the design of homes for those in the upper-middle and upper income brackets. Bain was responsible for many of the more prominent residences in the Seattle area.

Two Union Square
NBBJ's Two Union Square on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Union Street is one of the city's tallest buildings.
In 1957, Bill Bain Jr. returned from Cornell University to join the firm. Bain had been one of the leading students in design at Cornell and brought with him a determination to improve the quality of work being done by the firm in Seattle.

From 1980 to 1986, NBBJ began marketing aggressively in several new market areas. These included hotels, microelectronics, biotechnology and criminal justice. The criminal justice initiative, begun in the late 1970s had a great impact on the firm's growth. NBBJ began marketing an alternative for the health care market in 1984.

Among the firm's projects in the 1990s are Safeco Field; Reebok World Headquarters, Canton, Mass.; Istanbul Medical Center, Istanbul, Turkey; and the Hall of Still Thought, Taichung, Taiwan.