'Safety In Numbers': Why More Architects Are Selling Their Firms

Brad Zizmor and Dag Folger, co-founders of New York-based architecture firm A+I, were meeting in January 2025 and working out their succession plan. Three decades after founding the company, it was time to hand over the reins to the next generation.

The pair were in the process of transferring their ownership stake to a trio of successors when they received an email that would change the trajectory of the handover. 

It came from Phil Harrison, CEO of one of the country’s largest architecture firms, Perkins&Will, asking if they’d be interested in discussing a potential acquisition. Zizmor told him A+I wasn’t for sale, but Harrison said he was willing to simply act as a “sounding board” as the company was thinking through its next chapter. 

Less than four months later, the teams were sitting across the table from each other in Atlanta. Perkins&Will acquired A+I and its staff in September.

“In our profession, like almost all, there's this oncoming transition to the way service industries are going to behave and operate, which creates uncertainty and risk,” Zizmor said. “So they were able to de-risk a lot for us and give us the time and resources and playing field to try on different ideas and options.”

Eight months in, they’re building out a shared New York City office space for a combined headcount of around 200. The A+I team is expected to be folded into the Perkins&Will brand by next year, a spokesperson said.

Their deal is part of a recent uptick in architecture firm M&A activity across the U.S. The rise in tie-ups comes as rapid change sweeps across the industry, driven by the rise of artificial intelligence, development slowdowns across major asset classes, the rise of private equity and a generational shift in the workforce. 

“I think it's the potential volatility of the future,” Zizmor said. “This is why you're seeing a lot of consolidation in the industry.” 

“There’s sort of safety in numbers,” he added.

Perkins&Will, which typically does one to two acquisitions a year, bought four firms last year, including A+I, Harrison said. 

CannonDesign has made eight acquisitions over the past two years, including two over the last two months. One of those, New York City-based Ennead Architects, was its largest acquisition in its nearly 100-year history. 

Both CEOs told Bisnow they're using the acquisitions to expand and double down on their market presences, broaden the sectors they work in, and gain talented architects and leaders. 

‘You sort of dream into the future and then look back and figure out how you're going to get there,” Harrison said. “So, you think, ‘We wish in 10 years we had these capabilities, or we had these kinds of clients or we are operating in these geographies,’ and then you prioritize those.”

This month, 75-year-old Torti Gallas + Partners merged with fellow D.C. firm Wiencek + Associates. In April, Charleston, South Carolina-based Novus Architects combined with Des Moines, Iowa-based Invision.

Taylor Dolan, an attorney with Lee/Shoemaker who represents buyers and sellers in architecture M&A deals, said her law firm has seen an “uptick in clients interested in exploring M&A opportunities.”

“There seems to be elevated activity, for sure,” CannonDesign CEO Brad Lukanic said, noting that 2026 seems to be building up to a “greater intensity” of deals.

In a survey with more than 300 architecture firm leaders conducted during September 2025, the American Institute of Architects found that 12% of commercial architecture firms are actively considering being acquired over the following year, compared with 6% in October 2018, the last time the survey was conducted.

In the 2025 survey, 5% of the leaders polled said they had gone through a merger over the previous year, up from 3% in 2018. Nearly two-thirds of respondents expected architecture M&A to increase over the next three years, compared to just 40% in the 2018 poll. 

“More people are thinking they're going to be acquired, so that is where the movement is,” AIA Vice President of Research Michele Russo said.

The force that drove A+I’s acquisition — a generational handoff — is happening across firms nationwide. 

When asked if Zizmor was seeing his peer firms thinking through their plans for succession, he said he’s seen it with “only all of them.” 

The baby boomer generation, which accounts for 20% of the general population, is in the process of aging out of the workforce. The youngest boomers turn 62 this year. 

Dolan said firms with baby boomer owners that don’t have an internal succession plan or an alternative in place are typically left with two options: sell to an external buyer or close up shop. 

“And for the majority of them, M&A is a much more attractive option than closing the doors,” she said. 

Even for firms that have been proactively planning for an internal handoff, she said there are several hurdles that could prevent those transitions from taking place: The next generation of successors are showing that they’re more risk-averse. 

Even if they do, they may not have the cash to buy out the shares.  

Dolan said one of her architecture firm clients had been working through an internal succession plan for a decade, but the five equity partners couldn’t agree on a path forward. When they realized the vision wasn’t going to pan out, the firm set them up with a broker to explore options. It ended up selling to a private equity firm.

While private equity has historically been driven on the engineering side of the architecture engineering and construction sector and focused on bigger deals, that’s changed over the past five years, she said. 

Private equity acquisitions of architecture engineering and construction firms in 2025 jumped 32.7% from the year before, according to investment banking firm Capstone Partners. 

“We've seen PE firms building these AE platforms, where they're acquiring small to midsized architectural firms across the country, consolidating under one name or brand, and building that platform, as opposed to looking for just those one-off large firms,” Dolan said.

In October, D.C.-based KGD Architecture, a firm of more than 40 employees, was acquired by private equity group Signal Hill Equity Partners, its third such acquisition within eight months.

PE’s increased appetite for AEC acquisitions is driving up sale prices, per Capstone Partners.

“Private equity has come into the AEC space, and because of their presence, the pricing has increased,” Harrison said. “So for many sellers who weren't so interested in selling their firms in the past, all of a sudden they're thinking, ‘Huh, wow,’ at those numbers, ‘that's more interesting.’” 

Architect-owned firms like CannonDesign and Perkins&Will are also using these acquisitions to expand the asset classes and geographies they serve to weather downturns in certain sectors of the development pipeline.

“I do think firms are starting to think about how they diversify their projects and look for new markets, so that's the other kind of key reason that they bring folks on is to be more competitive or bring a more unique skill set in,” Russo said.

On the other side of the equation, firms that specialize in sectors that are experiencing development slowdowns right now — like multifamily, retail and office — may look to be scooped up to get above water. 

“Many projects have been shelved and haven't moved forward into construction, which is causing short-term cash flow issues for a lot of firms that are turning to M&A to solve that, instead of taking on debt in this unstable market,” Dolan said. 

Architecture firms, like so many, are also staring down the impacts of AI. 

In this age of exponential AI growth, firms can benefit from coming under the umbrella of those that have the capacity to invest in expensive, bespoke tools, Lukanic said. He said CannonDesign has launched its own generative AI tool for use by the firm.

It feels like a full-circle moment for A+I, which launched during the dot-com boom, another moment of rapid, unpredictable change.

“Us starting our practice during the internet boom is, I think, what gave me and Dag the clarity of vision of, like, ‘This is that same moment, it's just a different technology,’” Zizmor said.

“I think it's more like this convulsive shift towards new, and as opposed to this killing of something old, and I think this new is going to be so big and so different and so transformational that it's better done with friends.”