RDG Planning & Design last year discarded its old name, Renaissance Design Group, but stuck with an abbreviation that already was well-known in Greater Des Moines.

Still, the company, which started out simply as an architectural firm, is in a renaissance all its own. In addition to changing its name, RDG has added several offices Midwest, hired a few highly accomplished designers and landed some major projects, both in Central Iowa and throughout country.

Through these changes, company executives hope they are paving the way for RDG’s next generation of leaders, who they hope will continue the legacy of a company that has helped shape Greater Des Moines over the past 16 years.

“A classic model for a design firm is that you haven’t cut anybody, you haven’t transferred any knowledge and you haven’t started to sell the value of the firm to the next generation, so it either dies or gets obliterated or gets merged into another company,” said Phil Hodgin, one of RDG’s four managing principals. “We wanted to avoid that. We wanted to create a living thing, something that would grow and last forever.”

Renaissance Design Group was formed in 1989 through the merger of Des Moines-based Bussard Dikis and an Omaha firm. The company has grown from a 40-person staff to include more than 150 employees, 60 percent of whom are stockholders, in seven cities, with offices in Des Moines, Omaha, Coralville, Fort Myers, Fla., La Crosse, Wis., Chicago and Kansas City, Mo.

RDG Planning and Design acts as a holding company for its two business centers, RDG Iowa and RDG SWB, which is located in downtown Omaha. Company executives pride themselves on a system of horizontal management: A board of directors governs the vision of the firm, Hodgin said, but the actual operations of the firm are carried out at the local level.

“We’re not a structured organization,” said principal Davis Sanders. “You don’t ever hear anyone say, ‘This is my boss.’”

Hodgin said much of the organizational theory that the company has tried to put into practice surrounds inclusion and values.

“We very much believe in team so everybody in the firm has an active role, not just in serving clients, but an active role in leading a market or being on a project team or a training initiative,” he said.

Focused service

Last year’s name change came partially as a result of a survey of clients to determine what they though of when they heard “Renaissance Design Group.”

“Almost overwhelmingly they thought of men in tights and jousting, not anything about the Age of Enlightenment,” Hodgin said. But “Planning and Design” was added to the company name, which they said opened the doors to other possibilities, whether it be lighting, artistry or other facets of planning and design.

RDG has, over the last six or seven years, begun to stretch that line of thinking by establishing a laundry list of focus markets or “studios” within the company that include one or several architects or designers who specialize in a specific area, such as sports, higher education, senior living or urban design, which the principals say makes the firm more marketable to clients.

“It’s really filled out and all of that was purposeful,” Hodgin said. “We wanted to provide more services to our clients than we could as just designers.”

The thrust of that approach came from clients and their changing needs and approach to design projects.

“Clients are a lot more sophisticated today than they were 10 or 20 years ago,” said principal Al Oberlander. “Twenty years ago, people were just looking for an architect to do an office building or a college building. Now, clients are sophisticated enough to know that architecture and design can influence their bottom line and influence their profitability, their productivity. So they’re looking for people who have a lot more expertise than they used to.”

Oberlander helped RDG develop a national sports studio, which has completed projects such as the Valley High School Stadium in West Des Moines and the Iowa State University indoor practice facility.

The company was recently hired to work on the University of Iowa’s $55 million sports facility, as well as the University of Florida’s training facility for baseball, soccer, volleyball and track, its seventh architectural project on the university’s campus.

On the local level, the company has participated in major projects such as the Principal Riverwalk, the Iowa Events Center, Drake University’s Knapp Center and restoration of the state Capitol and Gray’s Lake.

“RDG can be the big mother ship if it wants to be,” Hodgin said. “We can go compete with some of the biggest firms in America for some of the biggest projects in America. But when it really comes down to it, we work with our clients in a very intimate way.”

The Valley High School Stadium is one of numerous projects that the company has completed for the West Des Moines Community School District, dating back to the 1970s and Bussard Dikis. RDG designed Crossroads Park Elementary School, Westridge Elementary School, Jordan Creek Elementary School and the Learning Resource Center. In addition, it has worked on renovations to Hillside Elementary School, Clive South Elementary School and Valley High School, a $31 million project in itself.

Associate Superintendent Galen Howsare said RDG became a part of the entire system through its involvement with several construction and renovation projects and by understanding the district’s “big vision.”

“One of their strengths is working with schools to help them articulate from a functional standpoint and translating that into form,” Howsare said. “It’s more about a partnership relationship, so they’re more about helping us achieve our dreams and aspirations.”

Integrated art

RDG has added several focus markets to its repertoire over the last several years, primarily because it had hired new employees who have the talents and experience to focus on a particular market, such as health care.

The company completed what it said is a nationally unique merger last year with artist David Dahlquist and his studio in Des Moines. The merger has allowed RDG to integrate Dahlquist’s artwork into public and private spaces and the landscape.

“At the same time, we’re having more and more opportunities to integrate and open up opportunities for our own designers, who are thinking in less conventional ways and know they can still get whatever they’re imagining in their design because we can produce it,” Sanders said. “And at the same time, it offers us as a company a whole new opportunity for product delivery and product development, which might be a full line of tiles.”

David Raver joined RDG after working with the company on the Iowa Events Center team and launched a lighting studio. Raver, whose educational background is in theatrical lighting, is the only certified lighting designer in the state of Iowa.

Oberlander added that there are still a number of people within the company who prefer to remain generalists in terms of architecture and design, which creates some balance to its level of expertise within certain markets.

Strategic moves

RDG has also spread its borders over the past three years, having opened offices in Chicago, Kansas City, Mo., and La Crosse, Wis.

“Every one of those three is a strategic hire that we’ve had and we’ve grown offices around those people,” Hodgin said. “We haven’t exactly been taking a map out and throwing darts at it saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be in San Diego.’ You don’t just do that. We go where our best people are finding homes.”

Dennis Reynolds, an urban designer and landscape architect, has been the catalyst for RDG’s Kansas City, Mo., office, having joined the company last year following his work on the Iowa Events Center team. He has worked on projects around the world, from a Formula One racetrack in Dubai to Olympic facilities in Athens and Beijing. He chose RDG over a handful of other national firms that were trying to hire him.

“They’re great people, they have fun and they have a very high regard for quality design, and the fact that they even have an artist and his studio as a part of the firm helped make my decision even easier,” Reynolds said. “It’s a firm that’s very smart about how it spends dollars, and when I go to places like Boston, they understand that these are people who give me high-quality design, but they’re very smart about how they’re spending that money.”

Reynolds is currently moving into a permanent office in Kansas City’s Union Station and company executives plan to add staff in the future.

Lu Cagin joined RDG as an interior designer in 1997 after graduating from Iowa State University, and was discouraged when her husband, a cardiologist, took a job in La Crosse a year and a half ago. That is, until the company decided to open an office in La Crosse in order to keep her on staff.

“It really made the transition just great for me and it makes me believe that they are willing to think outside the box as far as the firm they are,” Cagin said. “They don’t see barriers; they just see opportunities.”

RDG supplied her with the technology and equipment to set up an at-home office, and representatives provided upholstery, wall covering samples and other supplies so that she could build up her own library. She is working on interior design projects in La Crosse, and continues to work on projects in Central Iowa, including the restaurant in Wells Fargo Arena.

RDG hopes to move her into a more permanent office space in the future, possibly adding staff as is warranted. Cagin’s one-person RDG office has exceeded her expectations, and she knows she is better off continuing on with the company in this capacity than if she had ventured off on her own.

“There are great opportunities because I have a wide variety of people standing behind me, and I think it shows up in our work when I go to market the firm,” she said.

Planning for the future

RDG will continue careful expansion in the future, either through new focus markets or, possibly, new offices. But, Sanders cautioned, “We’re not adding offices to be adding offices. If it does happen, it’s likely to be centered on either an individual or a market that we’re looking at and feel strongly about.”

The company will continue to look to its focus markets, which have been a source for great success in recent years, and Hodgin said he hopes to fill in the gaps along a continuum that takes RDG and its clients from the conceptual stage to project completion, which would entail bringing in strategic partners and growing to meet the needs of the market. The company has also begun renovation work on a building directly north of its offices at 301 Grand Ave., which will house more than a dozen employees when it is completed later this year.

RDG’s principals take pride in a corporate culture that values its employees as its ultimate asset. They refer to a handful as “boomerangs,” because they left the company to take another job, only to return weeks later. They often have “Bring Your Dog to Work Day,” and have Friday afternoon cookouts.

“The generation that sort of took over for the generation whose names were on the door, we’re all now starting to look at the next 10 or 15 years and asking ‘Who’s next?’” Hodgin said. “We’ve got a lot of capable people within the organization who are very capable and trained to do that.”