NBBJ

Managing partner: Scott Wyatt

Specialty: Healthcare, corporate design, sports and entertainment, airports, commercial architecture, higher education, justice, research and advanced technology, retail, senior-living design, urban design and planning, graphic design

Year founded: 1943

2002 revenues: $155 million

Projected 2003 revenues: $155 million

Projected 2004 revenues: $163 million

Largest current projects: U.S. Federal Courthouse; Seattle Justice Center; Wellcome Trust biotechnology campus, Hinxton, U.K.; Cleveland Clinic; Harborview Medical Center addition, Seattle; Boeing Move-to-the-Lake project, Renton; Chang Ying Residential Community, Beijing; Hong Kong Exhibition Center

For Seattle’s giant design firm, NBBJ, business has been good the past two years, even though it has hovered around $155 million in gross revenues. Next year, predicts Managing Partner Scott Wyatt, there’s a chance of perhaps a 5 percent revenue increase to around $163 million.

“We’re expecting a bump in 2004, maybe a 5 or even 10 percent increase. But we’re just going through our budget process now with our market leaders, so it’s too early to say for sure what might happen,” Wyatt said. “However, we seem to be seeing the first real signs of that (increased activity) right now. It’s my personal guess that next year will be slightly better.”

NBBJ, the design firm for Seattle’s new Justice Center, the city’s new U.S. Federal Courthouse and Sea-Tac International Airport’s new terminal expansion, also stays focused on international projects in China, a hospital in Moscow, Russia, a medical center in Kuwait and a mixed-use project in Prague, Czech Republic.

One of the firm’s projects is the Move-to-the-Lake for the Boeing Co., signaling the nearing of a time when the aerospace company’s aging Renton plant may give way to new urban development opportunities for the city on more than 70 acres of south Lake Washington property.

“This plan focuses on moving all executives and critical staff for the 737 program into the manufacturing building when the 757 line comes down, offering Boeing powerful efficiencies in communication and production by the consolidation of offices that are presently scattered,” Wyatt said.

He said NBBJ also continues to plan its own move, from Pioneer Square to a new housing, office and retail project at South Lake Union in mid-2005.

“We’re doing well this year overall and I’m optimistic about the market turning up, not really fast, but with more positive than negative changes. It will be a mixed market, like normal as opposed to the late ‘90s when every sector was booming. That was really unusual. Our industry has to get back to being normal, with some markets up and some down. That’s the reason for our diversified strategy, to balance the workload,” Wyatt said.



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