HLW is an award-winning, global design, architecture and planning firm. HLW is headquartered in New York, NY, with offices in Madison, NJ, Los Angeles, CA, London and Shanghai. HLW is one of the oldest design firms in the United States, tracing its beginnings to 1885.
Following Perry Coke Smith's retirement in 1968, the firm's name was changed to Haines, Lundberg Waehler or HLW. International projects allowed the firm to bring their designs outside the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the Centro Sperimentale Metallurgico, a research center for the development of steel projects was completed on a 125-acre (0.51 km2) site outside Rome and the International Institute Of Tropical Agriculture, a research and housing facility on a 3,000-acre (12 km2) site in Ibadan, Nigeria. In order to accommodate growth in its overseas practice, the firm created a new division of operations, HLW International, with its first offices in Beirut and then in Athens with projects extending to Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.
In 1982, the first Midtown Manhattan office of the U.S. Trust Corporation was restored by the firm to the original 1896 design by McKim Mead and White, while accommodating the requirements of a 1980s office. HLW won awards from the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Building Owners and Managers Association, and the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America. In 1983, significant modifications were made for the existing Chemical Bank World Headquarters at 277 Park Avenue in Manhattan. This design included the enclosure of an existing plaza to create Chemcourt, which provided the city with a park-like enclosed space.
Exactly 100 years after the firm’s beginning with a commission to design the first telephone building in New York, a new project for NYNEX Corporation was initiated, as was a training center for The Travelers Insurance Companies in Hartford, Connecticut.
In the decades since HLW’s 100th anniversary, the firm has extended to broadcast, film and television industries. For Fox Studios in Los Angeles, HLW created a 50-acre (200,000 m2) campus that housed the first fully digital network broadcast center.[11] The project incorporated several buildings, creative site/landscape design and over 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2) of historical renovations. When Avon Products hired the firm to design a new global research and design center, HLW relocated the company from its old space into its new 227,500-square-foot (21,140 m2) facility in New York. Additional 21st century work include the United Nations Secretariat Building and North Lawn Conference Building, and Google’s East Coast Headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue
