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.
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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.
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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.