Dan Meis' design studio team joining AECOM's sports practice

DAN MEIS and 13 others from MEIS Design Studio have joined AECOM’s sports design practice. Meis will serve as Director of Global Sports Design, including oversight of a newly consolidated Americas Sports Group, including sports designers based in  N.Y., K.C. and L.A. 
 
AECOM -- a global construction, engineering, and design giant -- has more than 55,000 employees but only about 50 are involved with sports venue design. Following the departure of a handful of sports designers and the arrival of Meis and his group, AECOM EVP/Global Sports & Social Infrastructure Leader BILL HANWAY is now setting up the sports practice differently than the rest of the company, which largely divvies up projects in the U.S. on an East/West regional divide. The sports practice will follow where its relationships lead, regardless of geography.

"This may be a time to rethink how AECOM’s sports practice moves forward and how we can start to engage additional leadership, not a replacement but that’s transformational in how we look at the work,” Hanway said.
Despite making up a fraction of the overall company, AECOM’s sports practice is still a factor in the sports venue world, currently wrapping up its high-profile $2B-plus Intuit Dome project for the Clippers and already turning its attention to the LA28 Olympics and the renovations and buildout required for that event. The firm with a penchant for NBA arenas also designed Barclays Center and Golden 1 Center. Meis joining AECOM is a homecoming of sorts. He started his career at Ellerbe Becket in the early 1990s, before it was later bought by AECOM in 2009. 

“For me, it feels like being able to attach myself to a sleeping giant in sports,” said Meis, who will remain based in L.A. 
AECOM hopes to boost its sports practice to roughly 75 people. Of its massive global employee base, thousands are based in the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, three regions where the AECOM plans to pursue sports venue projects, especially with Brisbane hosting the 2032 Games (Hanway has a particular expertise in Olympic venue design and planning). Meis and Hanway expect several significant NBA arena projects in the next few years, Oklahoma City, for example, as well as some major college facilities. And Meis, who designed Everton’s Bramley-Moore Dock Stadium expected to open late this year, will continue to chase soccer stadium work in Europe as a flood of those projects come online. 

“Going after some of the larger projects with the bigger clubs there wouldn’t be possible without AECOM behind me,” said Meis, who was in SBJ’s inaugural Forty Under 40 in 1999. 
 
Meis co-founded the NBBJ sports practice in the 1990s, contributing to or leading on designs for Crypto.com Arena, T-Mobile Park, American Family Field, Lincoln Financial Field, and Paycor Stadium, but since striking out on his own, has tried with less success to hitch his smaller firm’s creativity and nimbleness to the resources of a larger firm, most recently Perkins Eastman in 2021. It’s been somewhat of a can’t live with them, can’t live without them-type experience for Meis; on several occasions, the acquisition of his studio served as a bigger architecture firm’s entrée into the sports market but ultimately didn’t work out. As Meis tries again with AECOM, there is one significant difference. AECOM is not acquiring MEIS Design Studio but has hired 13 design staff members to “form one fully collaborative team as a single Sports practice,” said Hanway. In the past, Meis has traditionally had his name or studio brand remain associated with the larger practice.

“The big commitment,” Hanway said is, “Dan and I have agreed that we’re all in as AECOM.”