CREJ

44 / BUILDING DIALOGUE / March 2022 ELEMENTS Thought Leadership One Year Later: Sasaki Makes its Mark in Colorado, the West A little over a year ago, Sasaki, an internation- al planning and design firm with offices in Boston and Shanghai, officially opened our Denver office. This opening fol- lows years of work in the Den- ver and Intermountain West area with some fantastic clients that we hold dear to our hearts, like McWhinney, Formativ, Golub, Bea- con Capital, the city of Denver and RiNo Art District. Our firm had been considering and planning the expan- sion for years and decided in 2020 that the time was right. The pandem- ic made us realize that it was critical to be more accessible to our clients, the places where we work and the communities that we want to serve. Additionally, we had several senior staff members who were passionate about Denver and the surrounding areas and wanted to put roots down, become part of the community, and make a positive change by bringing our value-driv- en approach to the area. Lastly, we had been build- ing an infrastructure that allowed us to collaborate remotely for years to facilitate our international work, and we now saw how it could be used at scale without impacting the quality of work. From a business perspective, Denver presented direct physical access to many major metro areas around theWestern U.S. through direct flights from Denver International Airport and cultural connec- tions to many of the regions where we work regu- larly, like the Midwest, Southwest and West Coast. The growth of the area and the critical need for sound planning and design consulting in the face of this growth also were appealing. The conver- gence of long-term revenue, senior staff interest and strategic geographic positioning made the de- cision to open an office in Denver a no-brainer. n Our culture. Since our founding as one of the first truly interdisciplinary architecture, land- scape architecture, engineering, design and ur- ban planning firms over 70 years ago, we have held true to our stance that when these fields come together on an equal playing field the ideas we co-create are simply better. That emphasis on transdisciplinary culture is the reason that we established the new office with transplants from our existing Boston office, from principals to staff and across disciplines. Since opening, the Denver office has continued to grow and now has over 15 people. Given the scale, breadth and reach of our work, we also continue to work extensively across Sasaki’s three offices as one studio. Sasaki’s scale, over 300 people across three of- fices, puts us in an interesting category. We are not a small, local studio that works regionally, nor are we a 1,000-plus employee company that has different satellites or regional hubs. Rather, we are a collection of designers and planners who work together across the globe on a wide range of issues and scales, from regional resilience and urban planning, district scale and campus master planning and design, public realm and park de- sign, to the detailed design of individual buildings and spaces. Our work has no single style, no single process and no single solution. We engage deeply with our clients and communities to constantly reinvent the wheel and develop context-specific ideas across scales and project types. Additionally, we hold our work and clients to a high standard, only working on projects that align with our val- ues of sustainability, equity and community ben- efit. We also invest heavily in research of new topics through external and internal partnerships that lead to the creation of new software, new tools Joshua Brooks Associate Principal, Denver Office Co-director, Sasaki The public realm design in RiNo seeks to create a flexible series of upgrades that allow for the district’s maker culture to continue while also ensuring safe, comfortable, and sustainable streetscape and landscape features.