Firm Description

Waggonner & Ball is located where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. We believe that designing for resilience requires living with water and building with nature.

Our work spans a range of scales, from buildings to landscapes, from cities to watersheds. Our work also spans a range of places, from New Orleans to Norfolk, from Bridgeport to Beijing. No matter where we work, we draw on the local and particular while engaging our global context of a changing climate, precarious economic conditions, and powerful new technologies. We work to align cutting-edge best practices with underlying deep structures of place. Our work emphasizes qualities more fundamental than style, and our focus is always on essential matters of soil, water, climate, space, light, and materials. We measure our performance over time; durability and resilience are critical.

Waggonner & Ball remains grounded in the New Orleans community while uniquely engaged in international practice. Since 1970, Waggonner & Ball and its predecessor firms have lived and worked in New Orleans – a deeply rooted place with a rich history, but also a port city with a constant exchange of materials and culture. From this perspective, we see New Orleans – a challenging environment on the front line of climate change where a holistic approach to design is essential – as both our home and our point of departure.