We take pride in making places that people love. At our core, Principle exists to plan, design, and build remarkable places. We partner with organizations interested in seeing the solid environmental, economic, and social returns that result from creating human-oriented environments. Our work lives at the boundaries of planning, design, architecture, and real estate development to provide design ideas and placemaking solutions anchored to the local community and its geography. We strive to deliver unique, practical, effective, and broadly-supported solutions.
We practice:
Planning for a
shared future.
We collaborate directly with people in their communities to craft a vision for the future. We work with those communities to pilot these plans so those visions can become real-world improvements today. Our approach spans from dynamic, large-scale comprehensive planning efforts to multi-faceted neighborhood plans. By partnering with cities and citizens, we endeavor to create strategies that authentically reflect the dreams of a place while fostering resiliency in an ever-changing world.
Design for the
human scale.
We harness the collective knowledge of entire communities to tackle complex problems and develop superior design solutions. Working with multidisciplinary teams, we synthesize local wisdom and enduring design principles to produce visionary plans that span in scale from entire neighborhoods to individual rooms.
Real Estate Development with New Urbanist values.
We work to rehabilitate historic buildings and construct new places that add value to their communities using the principles of New Urbanism. Our practice is committed to making remarkable buildings and public spaces. Implementing intricate urban projects gives our team a unique range of experience in construction, financing, and managing the creation of complex places. These lessons help inform and improve our planning and design work. Our development work allows us to understand what it takes for plans to become reality.
Community Engagement
that is truly
engaging.
At Principle, we recognize the invaluable knowledge that local people possess about the places we work. As a result, we prioritize a discovery process that involves a broad range of stakeholders. We aim to create a community around each project to encourage meaningful interaction among everyone involved. Our community engagement campaigns foster honest dialogue, challenging problem-solving, and consensus-building, even among diverse groups. By bringing together many perspectives, we gain a deeper understanding that informs our locally-driven planning and design solutions.
Tactical Urbanism,
because change can happen in weeks,
not years.
We aim to bring big ideas to life by implementing short demonstrations and pilot projects. Tactical Urbanism, a neighborhood-building approach that utilizes low-cost, short-term, and scalable interventions and policies to initiate long-term change, presents us with opportunities to do so. These intensive efforts offer a hands-on, fast-paced approach to placemaking that inspires local stakeholders and creates a more straightforward path toward permanent improvements.
Zoning Codes that make great neighborhoods possible.
Great places need effective policies and regulations. If properly calibrated, zoning, in particular, provides a more predictable tool for achieving a community's long-term goals. Our work helps local communities to generate codes for their neighborhoods, towns, and cities in a common language and straightforward fashion, leading to genuinely local solutions. Our mission is to make it easier for communities to adopt specific land use regulations that make it possible—and legal—to build great places.