LPA Leaders on ‘Built for Business’ and ‘Practice Disrupted’
CEO Wendy Rogers and key voices at the firm join the podcasts to share how LPA’s people‑first culture fuels innovation and resilience.
Built for Business — produced by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and hosted by Rachel Gresham and Ali Alsaleh — explores the business side of architecture. In the new episode “Driving Business Performance through Integration and Sustainability,” LPA CEO Wendy Rogers reflects on what it takes to build a firm that endures. She describes how LPA’s commitment to integrated design, sustainability and a people‑first culture has shaped the firm into a nationally recognized design leader.
In the episode Rogers also shares her own journey, the firm’s path to winning the 2025 AIA Architecture Firm Award and the mindset required to build a growth‑oriented practice. She credits LPA as a place defined by continuous evolution. “It’s always been a firm that’s challenged me,” Rogers says. “When you’re challenged and have the opportunity to use that creativity and how you think, to … position yourself for what comes next, that’s exciting — that’s a place you want to stay at.”
When she joined the firm, LPA was a single 40‑person architecture practice. Today, it has grown to 550 people, spans eight practice areas and operates as a fully integrated firm with engineering disciplines and a research team that equips designers with deeper insight and better tools for project work.
On Built for Business, Rogers also discusses a pivotal moment from the early 2000s, when LPA leadership challenged the firm to outperform California’s already stringent energy code by 25%. The goal pushed teams to rethink assumptions and make smarter design decisions — a turning point that accelerated LPA’s evolution into a deeply integrated practice where disciplines work in symbiosis to meet ambitious performance targets.
Today, LPA continues to exceed California’s energy code and consistently performs above industry averages in meeting the AIA 2030 Commitment to reduce carbon emissions across all projects. “As a team we can position ourselves … to accommodate where the value needs to go,” Rogers says in the episode. “Achieving the kind of sustainable performance we’ve done hasn't been done by charging clients more, it’s been done by making better decisions.”
Practice Disrupted — a podcast exploring how architects build better businesses, leverage emerging technology and create more sustainable, fulfilling practices — recently featured LPA Principal and Design Director Federico Cavazos, Digital Manager Jake Junge and Senior Design Researcher Rachel Nasland. The conversation centered on LPA’s “No Excuses” culture and the firm’s commitment to thoughtful design, high‑performance buildings and community impact.
The program’s host, Evelyn Lee, who also founded Practice of Architecture, an organization helping designers and firms identify opportunities for growth and build resilience, framed the episode around LPA’s national recognition. Titled “AIA Architecture Firm Award Winners: The Next Generation at LPA,” the episode examines how the firm is using its win as a catalyst for continued innovation and a better future for its business and clients.
“After we were announced with the Firm Award, one of our first focuses was making sure that it kept us hungry and that we continue to do the things that allowed us to be recognized, which was our focus on integrated design, building performance [and] carbon reduction,” Cavazos says in the episode.
Nasland echoed the heightened sense of responsibility that followed the honor. “We’re becoming more intentional in how we’re articulating what we do. We’re trying to share our message more broadly and clearly, and capture how our process results in better outcomes.”
Junge added perspective on how LPA is leveraging AI and internal historical data to inform design philosophy, improve processes, collect better data and free designers to be more creative in delivering robust solutions for clients and communities.