SAN FRANCISCO-Two western firms committed to sustainable urban design have merged. Mithun, a Seattle-based architecture, landscape architecture, planning and interior-design firm, and San Francisco-based Daniel Solomon Design Partners, internationally known for place-based urban design and housing, have combined forces. The integrated team of Mithun architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners and interior designers will operate as Mithun/Solomon.

DSDP will merge into the existing Mithun San Francisco office at 660 Market St. here this month; Mithun will retain its name outside the Mithun/Solomon office. DSDP’s three principals, Daniel Solomon, Anne Torney and John Ellis, become partners at Mithun in joining San Francisco-based Mithun principals Sandy Mendler, Antonio Pares and Roger Gula.

The merger is intended to elevate the venture’s capabilities in design for urban residential, mixed-use, office, civic, cultural, academic and institutional clients to meet the demand for livable, sustainable cities worldwide. “This merger reinforces Mithun’s commitment to urbanism and urban housing as a key component of a healthy world,” said Bert Gregory, chairman and CEO of Mithun, in a prepared statement. “We have respected Solomon’s work for years, and as the merger discussion unfolded, we discovered a deeply held, shared commitment to livable communities, to human and natural system health and to client service across private, institutional, non-profit and public sectors.”

Gregory tells GlobeSt.com that Mithun has had an office in San Francisco for some time, and the merger “broadens our ability to serve our client groups not only in California, but also nationally and here in Seattle. It’s a great team to be adding to our group.”

Solomon said in the statement that the housing, urban buildings, neighborhood design and urban repair that DSDP has done for decades are a perfect corollary to the sophisticated environmentalism, design sensibility and applied science that Mithun brings to the table. “It is rare that a business merger actually represents a conjoining of ideas that reinforces one another and extends their range.”

Solomon tells GlobeSt.com that Mithun has established a broad conceptual frame to direct physical design to the issues that are most important in the world. “They have also assembled the people to fill out that framework with specialized skills at the highest level. We are part of that growth process; Mithun brings a broader environmental focus and a much expanded playing field to us.”

Both executives tell GlobeSt.com that cities have been loved and cherished for millennia, and today’s demographics are spurring a revitalization of that love. As GlobeSt.com reported in July, higher-density developments around urban transportation facilities is a resurgent trend in some of the larger California cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and even parts of San Diego, say industry experts. With single-family homeownership challenges and the time and cost of driving commutes—not to mention the ongoing volatility of the multifamily sector—cities are seeing renewed vitality through transit-oriented development. “The Urban Land Institute and other urban-planning associations have for the last several years been concerned about trying to reorient development to higher densities around transportation facilities or nodes,” Howard Ellman of Buchalter Nemer’s real estate practice group in San Francisco, told GlobeSt.com at the time.

Instant Insights /

Western Architecture, Design Firms Merge

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