LAM architects Competitors

Foster + Partners is a global studio for architecture, urbanism and design, all rooted in sustainability and founded by Norman Foster in 1967. Since then, he and the team around him have established an international practice with a worldwide reputation. With offices across the globe, we work as a single studio that is both ethnically and culturally diverse.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is a global practice of architects, designers, engineers, and planners, responsible for some of the world’s most technically and environmentally advanced buildings and significant public spaces. The firm’s approach is highly collaborative, and its interdisciplinary team is engaged in a wide range of international projects, with creative studios based across the globe. In 2026, SOM was named one of the Most Innovative Companies in Architecture by Fast Company and received the Equality 100 Award: Leader in LGBTQ+ Workplace Inclusion from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. The firm’s portfolio includes numerous innovative landmark towers, including the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, One World Trade Center in New York, and Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, as well as large-scale urban planning initiatives that integrate density, mobility, and sustainability—including the award-winning Sultan Haitham City in Muscat, Oman, and the recently unveiled masterplan for Bradfield City, Australia’s first new city in more than a century.

BIG is a Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Zurich, and Bhutan-based global architecture firm operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, interior design, landscape design, product design, and research & development. The office is currently involved in a large number of projects throughout Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East, and Oceania. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes, not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economic flows, and communication technologies that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. We believe that in order to deal with today’s challenges, architecture can profitably move into a field that has been largely unexplored. A pragmatic utopian architecture that steers clear of the petrifying pragmatism of boring boxes and the naïve utopian ideas of digital formalism. Like a form of programmatic alchemy, we create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking, and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, we as architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet to better fit contemporary life forms. BIG is committed to supporting its new parents and their families, and is a proud member of Pledge Parental Leave. While on leave, BIGsters will continue to receive all employee benefits previously provided including health insurance and will remain eligible for salary increases and bonuses, as well as 52 weeks of job security. We offer 18 weeks of total paid leave in addition to accrued vacation to extend the paid leave for primary caregivers, and 4 weeks paid leave for secondary caregivers.