A Farewell to Page

The name Page has had a storied presence in the world of Texas architecture for more than 125 years. In 1898, Charles Henry Page and his brother Louis Page formed Page Brothers, a firm specializing in courthouses and other civic buildings, and quickly established themselves as leading voices for architecture in the state.  

By 1904, their reputation had already grown to the point that they were selected as architects for the Texas State Pavilion at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Page Brothers and its successor firm, C.H. Page and Son, created significant works around the state including county courthouses in Fort Bend and Anderson Counties and city hall buildings in Mexia and Eagle Lake. Their work was especially impactful in Austin, where they designed downtown landmarks like the Littlefield Building (1910), Travis County Courthouse (1930), and the U.S. Federal Courthouse (1935)—all of which remain prominent historical treasures today.

In 1935, Louis Page’s son, Louis Jr., partnered with his MIT college roommate, Louis Southerland, to form Page and Southerland, establishing the next generation of architectural leadership and influence. They got their first big break in 1938, during the depths of the Great Depression, when they were selected to design Rosewood Courts (initially called the Negro Housing Project) for the federal Public Works Administration.

When Louis Page’s younger brother, George Page, joined the firm in 1939, the name was changed to Page Southerland Page, and the project types they pursued diversified to include commercial buildings, churches, public schools, and medical facilities. In the 1950s, the firm ramped up its profile, in part by becoming campus architect for the University of Texas and by participating in the design of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Louis Southerland and others in the firm took pride in their personal interactions with national leaders in design such as Eero Saarinen and Richard Neutra. They were avowed modernists with a passion for creating an American architecture fully attuned to a new postwar culture.

The firm’s Business-Economics Building for UT (1962)—the first fully modernist building on that campus—was very well received in the progressive 1960s. Alcalde, a popular alumni publication, admired the “strikingly modern building,” crediting the “innovative look of the new place” with provoking advancements in the business curriculum that emphasized modern “systems, models, and solutions.”

Page Southerland Page was among the first architectural firms in the U.S. to incorporate in-house engineering into its practice. A high degree of technical acumen became a calling card for the company as it began to do work in Austin for national corporations like IBM beginning in 1961. The firm positioned itself early and strategically for the advanced technology and microelectronics boom that was coming to Texas, and would later attract longstanding clients like Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Samsung.  

During the mid-1970s, Page Southerland Page expanded with new offices in Dallas and Houston, creating opportunities for work in the oil and gas industry (including international projects in the Middle East) and in healthcare. As the design-oriented senior principals—Louis Southerland and Louis Page—reached retirement age, the firm took on a more corporate and national/international character. Page Southerland Page rebranded itself as PSP with a slick logo that fit nicely into the world of big business that was dominating midcentury America at the time.  The firm became known for its project management, technical precision, and quality control but was receiving far less recognition for design expertise than in its prior history.

A counterreaction to this emphasis came in the late 1990s as the 100th anniversary of the founding of Page Brothers approached. Leadership in the three Texas offices at the time—Jim Wright in Dallas, Matt Kreisle in Austin, and John Cryer in Houston—saw the value of design in attracting a more diversified clientele, especially in the public sector, academia, and commercial building. They dropped the PSP name and returned to Page Southerland Page, crafting a new direction for “the next 100 years.”

This is where I came in. I had my own firm in Austin for 20 years, during which time we had been in several joint ventures with PSP where my office contributed heavily to design and PSP handled management and production. We were a good complement to each other. In the late 1990s, I became a part of Page Southerland Page, joining the other six members of the Board of Directors in ownership of the firm.

We were interested in design that was generated by the character of its place. At Rough Creek Lodge (1999) we drew the architecture from the topography, vegetation and dramatic vistas of an 11,000-acre ranch in the Texas Hill Country. For the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Alpine (2008), we created a very different building character—one rooted in the distinct high-desert geography, landscape, and building traditions of West Texas. The architecture of the projects came directly from the ethos of their very memorable places.

Building on Page Southerland Page’s historic roots as a practice committed strongly to its place, we set out—at an urban scale—to become a national example of the powerful difference architects can make over time in building cities and communities. The Austin office, in particular, became deeply involved in downtown revitalization through civic participation and community activism as well as through professional projects.

We worked with multiple mayors and city councils and were active in a wide range of organizations related to design. During his term as president of the Heritage Society of Austin, Matt Kreisle used the millennium year in 2000 as an opportunity to convene a group of urban design professionals to reassess historic plans for the future of Austin, learn from past initiatives, and set a direction for new growth.  

Page Southerland Page became the firm of choice (often in partnerships with others) for many landmark civic projects in Austin, including various master planning efforts for the city, the state, and the University of Texas; a new convention center; a new airport terminal; a major state office complex at the foot of the Capitol Building; and a new six-block mixed-use district centered on City Hall. The firm’s individual projects for private developers contributed substantially to the cohesive, lively downtown for which Austin became known.

Several extraordinary opportunities for high impact arose when we were first hired to create a master plan for a district and were subsequently selected to design multiple buildings to substantiate that plan. This occurred both at the 30-plus-block tract master planned for the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin—where our work led to four building projects—and at the adjacent 40-block State Capitol Complex, where we served as master architect for the first three buildings. In the same era, the Houston office began playing an active role in the revitalization of that city’s downtown, beginning with the adaptive reuse of derelict older buildings in the urban core. The Rice Hotel project converted a grand old landmark into condominiums, bringing badly needed residents into downtown.  Seven similar adaptive reuse conversions to residential occupancy followed over the next decade.

A mixed-use project for Christ Church Cathedral (2007) integrated a center for the homeless into a very complex bit of city fabric and received all the top awards the community had to offer. The 12-acre Discovery Green Park, completed with Hargreaves Jones, landscape architects, became a critical seed project that sparked a transformation of the east side of downtown, while Buffalo Bayou Park, designed with SWA Group, and The Cistern provided similar civic amenities and arts venues on the west side.

Discovery Green was conceived with strong urban design intentions. It was envisioned not just as a park, but as a city-building project. What had once been a sea of weedy surface parking lots was transformed into a vibrant mixed-use district focused on activated open space. As The New York Times noted, Discovery Green became a powerful symbol of Houston’s future.

As Kreisle and Cryer were approaching retirement, multiple suitors sought to purchase Page Southerland Page. One, in particular, made an offer in 2012 that would have been extremely rewarding financially to board members who held the largest number of shares. Very much to their credit, the top shareholders, Kreisle and Cryer, backed rejecting the deal because of the value they placed on the history and culture of the firm and the loyalty they felt to the next generation of leaders who were rising at the time.

After these two longstanding leaders retired in 2013, we, the seven remaining board members, rebranded the firm to simply “Page” and completely restructured how shares were distributed.  Overnight, ownership flattened radically, from a handful of board members owning almost all the shares to 65 key leaders across all the offices gaining “skin in the game.” Along with ownership and participation in profits, this much larger group got greater responsibility and influence. In addition, the new board established an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) so that everyone in the firm had a financial stake.

This radical diversification of both responsibility and rewards paid off handsomely. The firm became a magnet for talented, entrepreneurial architects and engineers who took great pride in the firm they were building and the quality of the diversified work they were doing.

The more longstanding design initiative continued to pay off as well, with Page winning 13 TxA Design Awards and 34 local AIA awards over a 25-year period. Projects ranged from a tiny elementary school in a disadvantaged neighborhood to the Austin airport. Page’s work was published in Texas Architect 61 times. The longstanding legacy of the firm as a strong and positive design force in Texas had been re-established.  

Page’s national reputation grew exponentially as well. The firm won 82 national/international design awards, and its work was featured in U.S. and global design publications 153 times from 1995 to 2020, including features in every major U.S. journal as well as periodicals in far-flung places like Turkey, Brazil, China, and South Africa.

I sold my shares and rolled off the Board of Directors in 2020 after 21 very exciting and rewarding years in leadership at Page, but continued project design work, which had always been my first love. Two years later, James Wright, another 20+ year veteran of the board, made a similar shift. In 2023, Bob Burke and Michael Mace, both from the Austin office and each on the board for more than a decade, followed suit.

The board did not fill two of the four vacancies these transitions left, reducing its membership to five, only three of whom were architects. On April 3, 2025, they announced that they had signed a definitive purchase agreement to sell Page to Stantec, a global firm with over 450 locations worldwide and approximately 32,000 employees. Stantec is based in Canada and is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

At a retrospective moment like this, it is instructive to remind ourselves of the incredible impact firms can have on their communities, their culture, and on the lives of, not only the people who work for them, but also the ones who inhabit the places they design. 

Too often, as architects, we refer to individuals as the building blocks of our discipline—heroes to be revered and emulated. In fact, architecture is created by teams of people working together, and the building blocks of our discipline are, more accurately, our firms.

Firms like Page engender powerful attachment, loyalty, and even affection. They are places where people work for decades—sometimes even their entire careers. They are “built to last,” to use the phrase coined by business guru and Stanford professor Jim Collins. They are guided by “core values” and are about “more than profits”—two key characteristics, according to Collins, of organizations that stand the test of time and thrive decade after decade.

The name Page and the legacy of architectural design and practice it has stood for over the last century and a quarter will be sorely missed.