Principals of E2A-Global include: (from left) Wilson F. Pollock, Ronald P. Adrianse and Tommi Tuominen.

It is one thing to run a successful architectural firm, but ADD Inc. President Wilson F. Pollock knows it requires extra effort when one is taking on the world. Although his Cambridge-based company has recently expanded into the San Francisco and Miami markets with relative ease, the goal of opening offices overseas to create an international practice was an especially daunting challenge, Pollock recounted last week.

“It seemed like it would be a 20-year process,” said Pollock. “We knew we had to find a way to meet our long-term goals in a more reasonable time frame.”

The solution, which occurred via a chance meeting, has resulted in ADD Inc.’s strategic alliance with a pair of overseas architectural concerns, Evata in Europe and the Adrianse Group in Asia. The trio hopes to establish themselves as global leaders in workspace design, Pollock said, sharing clients and projects in both the United States and abroad.

After unveiling their plan earlier this summer, principals of the three firms were in Cambridge last week ironing out details of the new alliance, which will be known as E2A-Global. The strategy fits well with the client base and capabilities of all three companies, said Evata President Tommi Tuominen, explaining that the continued globalization of the economy has created many large companies that need architectural services in multiple countries.

Founded in Helsinki 30 years ago, Evata has increased its presence throughout Europe and elsewhere during the past five years, Tuominen said, merging with a Spanish company and recently expanding into Russia. Increasingly, however, many of his firm’s clients began needing service in the United States, he said, including a French telecommunications company that needed a new office in San Francisco. That led to a meeting between ADD Inc. and Evata that ultimately gelled into the three-pronged alliance. Evata and the Adrianse Group had already been working together because they shared similar clients, Tuominen said.

Adrianse Group founder Ronald P. Adrianse said he sees the union as giving his firm the ability to better serve the proliferation of companies from North America doing business in Asia. The union will establish an international network of 22 offices and more than 600 professionals, offering a wide swath of expertise and geographic coverage.

“We see this as a way to add value to our clients, because it gives them the ability to interface with us wherever they wish,” he said. “We think they will recognize this as a huge benefit.”

Manifest destiny among Bay State architectural firms is certainly nothing new, with such firms as Sasaki Assoc. of Watertown and Stubbins Assoc. possessing long resumes of overseas work. Somerville-based Arrowstreet recently began design of a new office building in Latvia, for example, while the firm has also done assignments in Iceland, Argentina and Puerto Rico.

At Sasaki, architect Gary Anderson has spent more than a decade globetrotting to such faraway destinations as Japan, Greece, Lebanon, East Germany and Spain. He is currently principal-in-charge of a massive resort project on the Red Sea in Egypt, a 6,000-acre undertaking that will include hotels, a golf course, commercial villages and a 1,100-slip marina.

Sasaki’s international bent not only dates back decades, Anderson said it continues to be fed by the influx of overseas students coming to Boston architectural schools. Those students either establish contacts with classmates that later lead to overseas opportunities, or they may work in Boston and help the firm seek out projects in their homeland.

“We have a very international staff here,” Anderson said of Sasaki’s 300-member practice.

‘Tricky Situation’
Anderson agreed with Pollock that it is difficult to find work by blindly opening an overseas office. Sasaki, whose international practice accounts for between 5 percent to 15 percent of its overall volume, wins many of its projects either through repeat clients, or by being invited to compete for an assignment. The firm does no cold-calling for such deals, Anderson said.

Estelle Jackson, another local architect with substantial overseas credentials, stresses that pursuing such a path “can be a very tricky situation,” noting that it has even caused the demise of some practices. The Architects Collaborative, one of Boston’s most established firms, failed in the mid-1990s after incurring fatal losses from a failed overseas foray, for example.

Despite such potential pitfalls, Jackson said she believes more and more architects are looking at the global market, partly because of the opportunities, but also due to the recent slowdown in the local economy. The fervor was evident earlier this month, she said, at an annual forum she holds on international practice through the Boston Society of Architects. Attendance was overflowing, said Jackson, who heads up the BSA’s International Markets Committee.

“It’s very much an active pursuit,” Jackson said. “A lot of us have international practices now.”

Jackson said she believes ADD Inc. is taking the right approach in forming the alliance, stressing the importance of working with local architects in a given market, professionals who know both the culture, codes and government of a given country.

“We always collaborate” with local firms, seconded Anderson. “We find the best ones and try to engage them early on in the process.” Simply handing off design documents and instructing the local practice to produce them simply does not work, he said. The local player wants to have a say in the design, he said, and is also generally more in tune with how a project should fit into the surrounding landscape and culture.

“You either engage them in the process and get everyone involved, or the client ends up being the design policeman,” Anderson said. “And that isn’t good for anybody.”

Jackson, who has been working overseas since 1978, and Anderson said the interest in looking abroad always increases when a firm’s regional practice slows up, but they warned it is not a simple matter of changing gears. It can take years for such an effort to bear fruit, Anderson said, adding there is also the massive costs involved. If a firm is seeing its billings drop, it can be a difficult leap of faith to spend untold sums pursuing work internationally, Anderson said.

“To have people out trying to stir up speculative business can be very tough and expensive,” Anderson said.

In recognizing such potential pitfalls, Pollock said he is confident that ADD Inc.’s approach is the right one. With such well-heeled clients as Nokia, IBM, Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems, the three firms have an established base of multi-national companies to service, clients who are providing the alliance with enough work to get the initiative underway.