Who WE ARE

Clinton Brown Company Architecture was born from necessity in 1988, on a desk made of a door recovered from a dumpster on sawhorses and located in a borrowed loft space in a then, near-vacant downtown Buffalo. Fueled by the drive for renewing historic buildings and heritage places, CBCA opened as a small firm motivated to making the world a better place for everyone by keeping landmarks out of landfills and creating new reasons for their self-sustaining contribution to their communities, a mission that still drives us to this day.                   

Opening during a recession when preservation was not a priority, our early work required an entrepreneurial approach to creating new projects from discarded buildings by envisioning what they could be. Along the way we have found the friends and funds necessary to make this vision a reality and have been able to survive and prosper in a rapidly changing environment.

Our approach to create work and make a difference relied on a process of simultaneously listening to and learning from the heritage character of a place, listening to and learning from people while collaboratively creating a shared vision of a place’s better future, and aligning these with capital and operating funding. With over 3 decades of experience practicing this, we have made a difference for places and people in communities large and small.

Today, the CBCA team remains true to its origin as a pioneering, innovative and powerful force in design excellence based on a right balance of social equity, environmental health, and commonwealth. We have become a trusted and reliable advocate for the preservation and rehabilitation of culturally and historically significant buildings and heritage places and the people they serve.