BY ZACH MORTICE

AHBE’s Burbank Water and Power EcoCampus, Burbank, California. Courtesy MIG, photo by Sibylle Allgaier.

Calvin Abe, FASLA, the founder of Los Angeles-based AHBE, had been pondering the future for about two years, a process he’d put on hold for many months to sort out his own thinking on how he wanted his 30-plus-year-old firm to survive him and its other partners. For the firm’s legacy to continue, he’d have to let in new blood, and new opportunities. And that was the realization that convinced him to commit to a merger. “If I would continue to hang onto it, I would become obsolete, unless I allowed other leaders to come in and take the reins,” Abe says. In early 2019, AHBE and MIG, the multidisciplinary firm, announced they would join forces.

The merger of AHBE and the planning, design, and engineering company MIG is set to double down on the growth and development of Los Angeles, offering MIG more design “depth and capability” and giving AHBE’s legacy a sturdy institutional buttress, says Daniel Iacofano, FASLA, a founding principal of MIG.

MIG’s Hing Hay Park in Seattle. Courtesy MIG|SvR, photo by Miranda Estes Photography.

The merger was completed in February. AHBE and its staff of 17 have become AHBE|MIG and will continue to work out of the firm’s current office in downtown Los Angeles. Founded in 1982 in Berkeley, California, MIG has 12 offices in five states, mostly on the West Coast, with a staff of more than 200. AHBE’s four principals (Calvin Abe, FASLA; Linda Daley, ASLA; Gary Lai, ASLA; and Evan Mather, FASLA) are now principals at MIG.

Over the past two decades, AHBE has become well regarded for its high-quality civic landscapes that make “the connection between our experiences and nature more obvious” and demonstrate how “nature can infuse and integrate into the city,” Abe says. It’s perhaps best known for the Burbank Water and Power EcoCampus, the headquarters of the utility company Burbank Water and Power. With three rooftop gardens and solar panel arrays, the campus transformed a decommissioned electrical substation into a lush hanging garden, where remnant industrial structures form a trellis thick with vines and foliage. Throughout, runoff is managed with a variety of water filtration technologies.

AHBE’s Cedars-Sinai Plaza Healing Gardens. Photo by Sibylle Allgaier.

Two and a half years ago, Abe enlisted a merger broker to find potential partners—generally large, multidisciplinary firms that could expand the scope of AHBE’s work. He found several suitors, but declined the matches. They were relatively traditional (and thus ill-suited) landscape architecture firms. “I didn’t get the sense that they had a broader vision about the world, and what impacts they could contribute,” Abe says. MIG came close, but ongoing discussions at AHBE about the future of the firm required them to shelve these offers. Eventually, these discussions brought Abe back to the option of a merger a year after he put it all on hold. He says he struggled with how to make the common vision his team had assembled over the years as resilient as possible for the future. Last summer, with a new sense of urgency, Abe traveled to Berkeley, California, where MIG is based, to restart merger talks. “We wanted a future for all of us, and we wanted to grow a lot quicker. This is really the best way to accomplish that.”

Abe says the two firms were united by a shared, civic purpose. “MIG has Daniel’s vision of making the world a better place,” he says. “Our practices are quite different, but that’s what binds us together.”

Growing Vine Street, an urban watershed green space by MIG|SvR. Courtesy MIG|SvR, photo by Billy Hustace.

MIG is a multidisciplinary firm, with specializations in landscape architecture, branding, civil engineering, biology, social science, planning, architecture, live animal exhibit design, zoning, policy planning, and dozens of other topic areas. Its clients include colleges, local and state government, cultural institutions, and nonprofits. Abe says his firm had been trying to obtain more planning work, and he anticipates that “the joining of MIG provides immediate access to that.” In its final stages, he brought few preconditions to the negotiating table—primarily a request to retain copyright ownership of several projects.

Abe describes AHBE as “a design component of the organization,” but he’s not concerned about a shift in autonomy. “We look at this as expanded opportunity,” he says. “They’re not really taking over—other than accounting-wise.”

Within its rich client base, MIG was looking to strengthen its presence in a premiere market: Los Angeles. Since the early 1990s, the firm has had a presence in Los Angeles County and surrounding counties in the metropolitan area, but had no offices in the city of Los Angeles until the merger. Betting on long-term trends toward population growth and an ambitious expansion of public transit led by a mayor who’s focused much of his power on the city’s sustainable expansion, Iacofano says that the city will become a more green and urban place. The Measure M sales tax that became law in 2016 will funnel $120 billion into the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s coffers over the next 40 years. During that time, the city will host the World Cup in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028.

“AHBE puts us in a position to contribute to that growing future,” says Iacofano.

AHBE’s Wonderful College Prep Academy in Delano, California. Courtesy MIG, photo by Heliphoto.

For Abe, the merger is a way to access the broadest possible range of Los Angeles’s development. “MIG provides such a multifaceted, multidisciplinary practice that it creates a whole different frame for us to operate, and be supported,” he says. “When we go after a project, we hire the civil [engineers], we hire the biologist, the ecologist. We now have the privilege of having all of that in-house.”

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist who focuses on landscape architecture and architecture. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram.