CRE publication The Real Deal has released its annual list of the ten most commercially successful firms in New York City’s high-profile building market. Most of our readers will recognize these firms as regulars in Archinect Jobs. 

As the architects of record, these firms appeared in permitting documents for developments that totaled more than 13.5 million square feet in total area. TDR ranked the firms by the aggregated square footage of their business output. 

SLCE took the top billing with 10 projects worth a total of 3.1 million square feet followed by Handel Architects, which had a total of five projects and 2.5 million square feet combined. The top two were followed by Perkins Eastman, which had six totaling 2 million square feet, including a planned 74-story development in Long Island City. Beyer Blinder Belle took the fourth slot with 1.4 million square feet and four developments, followed by Gene Kaufman Architects, which registered five with a total of 1.3 million square feet. S9 Architecture came next with four projects that totaled 1.2 million square feet, followed by Fogarty Finger, which had eight for about 1.15 million square feet in total, and FX Collaborative, which had three totaling just over 1 million square feet. Fischer + Makooi and ODA rounded out the list with a combined total of 13 projects totaling 991,000 and 810,000 square feet respectively.

The report comes at a time when building in the pandemic-ravaged and rapidly changing city saw some of its best news in years. Last month, Ian Volner wrote in Metropolis about the boom in new developments that happened throughout 2021 and went largely unnoticed. New York was no exception, registering over 1,600 new permits filed between just between Q2 and Q4 alone. The figures represented a 22 percent increase when compared to the sum total of pandemic-ravaged 2020 and can be directly attributed to the state’s soon-to-expire 421a property tax exemption and the Biden administration’s recently-passed infrastructure bill, according to Volner.

“In large measure, this is due to what may well stand as the most consequential political development of 2021: the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law in mid-November,” the writer explained. “[The] IIJA represents the largest-ever one-time down payment on the nation’s built environment — a third bigger than the Obama Administration’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, bigger even (as a percentage of nominal GDP) than the prime infrastructure component of FDR’s 1933 National Recovery Act.”