After more than four decades of designing projects in Austin from afar, including what's soon to be the tallest tower in Texas, one of the nation's top architecture firms has decided the time is ripe to open a permanent office in the city. And it went out and hired two veteran architects from a competitor to lead it.

Dallas-based HKS plans to officially open in Austin next year its 25th global office, with veteran architects Brad Wilkins and Chi Lee at the helm to lead the Central Texas studio. HKS hired Lee and Wilkins from the Austin office of Perkins & Will, a Chicago-based architecture firm where Lee served as corporate, commercial and civic practice leader and Wilkins was the firm's principal for architecture and urban design.

At HKS, Lee is the Austin office director, while Wilkins serves as studio design leader. And they have their work cut out for them, because HKS has about 50 projects that are either active or on deck in Austin. They include the 74-story, 1,022-foot-tall mixed-use tower at 98 Red River St. in downtown Austin that is expected to be the tallest building in Texas once it is completed; the Republic, a 48-story, 833,000-square-foot office tower also downtown at 401 W. Fourth St.; and the Domain 9, a 330,000-square-foot office building fully leased to Amazon in the Domain, Austin’s second central business district about 12 miles north of downtown.

“When the opportunity arose to help [HKS] grow an Austin presence, it was hard not to say yes,” Lee told CoStar News. “Austin is really at an interesting inflection point. We’re still a little bit of a small town, except that we’re starting to face certain constraints with big-city issues. So I do think firms like ours bring a broader view to Austin.”

HKS, which Fast Company magazine named one of the world's 10 most innovative architecture firms this year "for helping buildings breathe easier," has designed projects around the globe such as the Four Seasons Bodrum in Turkey and the Jinjiang International Exhibition Center in China, as well as several high-profile U.S. projects like SoFi Stadium in the Los Angeles area and the Jasper Residential Tower in San Francisco.

Metropolitan Austin's population jumped 33% over the past decade, reaching nearly 2.3 million residents in 2020, making it the No. 2 fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country in that time. Georgetown and Leander, located in the area, were the two fastest-growing cities in the country between 2020 and 2021. Georgetown's population grew 10.5% to 75,420 residents at a growth rate that would double the city's population in less than seven years, according to the Census Bureau.

Many of the new residents flocking to Austin hail from California, some following the plethora of West Cost tech companies such as Oracle, Apple and Google relocating or expanding their operations in the Texas capital, which has long been known as a tech town because of its highly educated workforce stemming from the University of Texas at Austin.

Even though HKS is just now planning its first permanent Austin office, the company has worked on about 200 projects in the city since the early 1980s, starting with its first project at 700 Lavaca St. Other past projects in Austin include the upscale hotel Aloft, the 36-story apartment tower The Bowie, the Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas, the apartment complex Element and the JW Marriott Hotel.

"There’s always been wonderful work being done here by HKS," Wilkins told CoStar News. "The continued success and continued growth of Austin is something we’re betting heavily on, that this city is going to keep on this rocket ride that it’s on."

The firm has 25 employees working out of temporary space at 600 Congress Ave. right now, with plans for Lee and Wilkins to lead the HKS transition to a permanent office within the next year. The number of people working out of the new HKS office could expand once the permanent space officially comes online. HKS is shopping for its permanent space and hopes to commit to its new Austin office in early to mid-2023.

Lee, who specializes in student housing, commercial infrastructure and public transit, has spent the past 18 years in Austin. He previously worked at architecture firms Gensler and Page before Perkins & Will.

“Our demographic is changing quite a bit,” Lee said. “Think about where we were maybe 10 years ago, the population here, the thought process and experiences that population had, versus where we are now, with all the influx of the coastal folks. The tastes have changed. So, what we design, and how we influence our community, is going to change, as well.”

Wilkins, who has nearly 24 years of experience in architecture, started working as an architect on high-rise projects in Chicago before hopping around cities in Europe and Asia, working on more than 100 projects in 20 countries, including multiple high-rise projects in Singapore and London.

Austin "is where I want to be," Wilkins said. "It’s about bringing that diverse experience of understanding cultures and climates and different types of projects and different types of viewpoints and bringing that learned body of knowledge to our clients here.”

Wilkins said HKS has perfectly timed its expansion in Austin, as the work he and Lee will be doing over the next few years could be life-changing.

“What’s great is Austin really has that nascent feeling to it. It’s the time period right now when projects that may have been a little bit colloquial, may have been a little bit small-city-like, are now able to reach past that bigger idea of design excellence and really change lives,” he said.

Wilkins specializes in skyscraper design but also focuses on urban planning, energy efficiency and transit-oriented design.

“My role is to look out for the design excellence of whatever project we’re doing. To some architects, that only means aesthetics. To us, it’s about everything. It’s about how are you doing something better for the community. How are you doing something better for diversity and inclusion. How are you doing something for the climate,” Wilkins said.