Following last week’s visit to New York’s Lang Architecture, we are moving our Meet Your Next Employer series westwards to Seattle, where we find civic design specialists LMN Architects.

The encounter isn’t our first with LMN. Back in 2018, we spoke to the firm’s partner Stephen Van Dyck as part of our How To Get A Job At ____ series. In the conversation, Van Dyck emphasized the importance of speaking thoughtfully about one’s design process, noting “we want to learn about their approach to, and thoughts on design, and how they demonstrate critical thinking and problem solving skills.”

Now counting over one hundred members, the firm is currently hiring for four positions on Archinect Jobs: a Specifications Strategist, Project Manager, Project Architect, and Interior Designer.

Since their founding in 1979, LMN has adopted what they call a “radical pragmatist” approach to design. By beginning the design process with a fine-grained understanding of the place, brief, and community, the firm arrive at a solution which they believe to be greater than the sum of its parts.

“Great wholes, we believe, emerge from fully understanding and honoring the parts,” they note. “It is our deeply held belief that the best projects, places of great utility and imagination, where people naturally gravitate and feel inspired, result from open, honest, balanced communication from multiple perspectives.”

The desire for open communication and multiple perspectives is reflected in the firm’s structure. Their team of 100+ personnel span architecture, interior design, urban design, and design research, with project teams often containing representatives from each discipline. Meanwhile, the firm’s R&D wing, LMN Tech Studio, operates under the three broad topics of sustainability, fabrication, and emerging potentials, seeing explorations into decarbonization, new materials, and digital tools, to name a few.

This attention to multidisciplinary design, and an emphasis on placemaking and sustainability, can be seen in several of LMN’s projects. For their Founders Hall at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business,  the team combined a heavy timber structure with cross-laminated decking to reduce the building’s embodied carbon by 58%, they claim.

An expressive timber structure also forms the anchor for their Mukilteo Multimodal Ferry Terminal in Washington state, whose design was inspired by a local tribal longhouse, and designed in collaboration with several local tribes. For the Grand Avenue Park Bridge, meanwhile, LMN solved an intricate sequence of grade changes by designing a weaving collection of ramps and stairs across a sloping 257-foot-long truss, creating a dynamic civic space for utility and leisure.

If awards are a metric for success, the firm’s “radical pragmatist” approach has struck a chord. In 2022, LMN picked up an AIA Education Facility Design Award for their Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences Middle School (in addition to its 2021 AIA Interior Architecture Award), and a WoodWorks Wood Design Award for their Mukileto terminal. 

In 2021, their Raisbeck Music Center in Seattle was named one of the 100 best new buildings by American Architects at the American Architecture Awards, while their Sound Transit University of Washington Station was a winner at the 2021 AIA Architecture Awards. The 2020 edition of the AIA Architecture Awards also saw recognition of the firm’s Voxman Music Building in Iowa.

Meet Your Next Employer is one of a number of ongoing weekly series showcasing the opportunities available on our industry-leading job board. Our Job Highlights series looks at intriguing and topical employment opportunities currently available on Archinect Jobs, while our weekly roundups curate job opportunities by location, career level, and job description.