About Us | Able City

To contribute meaningfully, the profession and practice of architecture needs to pledge to fulfill a purpose beyond the production of buildings.

Viviana Frank

Partner/Co-founder

Able City is a nationwide, majority-bilingual family of architects, designers, planners, economic developers, and community engagement specialists, committed to connecting people with the kinds of places and policies designed to bring everyone in.

Meet us

We are: Viviana L. Frank-Franco, Mario A. Pena, Frank Rotnofsky, Diana H. Pena, Ricardo Solis, Carlos Gallinar, Claudio Leon, Luis Pruneda, Juan S. Garza, Victor A. Montes Jr., Edna Zepeda, Teresa Barker, Ernesto Torres, Gabriel De Leon, Alfonso Sepulveda, Hector Quintanilla, Marett Flores, Laura Garcia Arango, Angelo Gomez, Gabriel Camarena, Lorena Gonzalez, Luis Escalante, Anabel Villareal, Cierra McCarther, Sabrina Lopez, Ricardo Colindres, Bryan Chavez, Sydney Aschbacher and Gilbert Peña.

Our Shared Value Proposition

The built environment has a high purpose, it can provide better social, environmental, and economic outcomes in the lives of citizens. We named the company Able City because in two words it describes what cities should do; be able to serve the whole citizen.

The company’s corporate purpose is to advance the quality of life and place that citizens for a more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive society want in the built environment through the practice of architecture, planning, and economic development.

c. 1978

Able City’s predecessor firms (Turner Hickey Architects and Frank Architects) began practicing in 1978 and 1990 respectively, where for forty years they brought architecture toward the work of building longstanding community partnerships.

In 2016, Able City officially folded in the specialized planning, city-making, and economic development services that have come to define its industry-leading design approach.

2018

Able City opened its headquarters in San Antonio to serve as a central location for the communities we serve around South Texas. The office on Broadway joined the Laredo office on Victoria St, which, as a converted tire store, is an in-house example of the opportunities for sustainability made possible by rehabilitation and reuse.

2023

Able City dedicated its third office, following the beginning of a major community egagement, architecture, and planning project in the Rio Grande Valley. Across our three offices and four service areas, Able City’s work has always come back to one shared value initiative.

We were all likeminded. We saw the opportunities of expanding beyond a traditional architectural office. As emphasis on health, wellness, and equity has evolved, we've evolved. We've evolved as people — and bring that into what we can add to architecture and urbanism.

The first step was compatibility in the design process — we’ve always been able to have productive design conversation that created better spaces together. The Cigarroa Track & Field project. Its as simple but it turns out really well — we both added to it in a way where alone we might not have been as successful... The big thing was discovering that we both had aspirations to take architecture into places that most practices don't traditionally touch. We recognized that tackling the systematic problems was something we wanted to do with our expertise.

Able City was born from our professional realization that the fastest path towards producing work that could respond to the needs and problems we saw our community and other cities facing was a holistic approach. As climate change, health disparities, and the unequal distribution of opportunity and income, (sustainability and equity) are the most pressing of issues, we turned from architecture alone and its “conventional business wisdom" to becoming an engine for transformational change as it relates systematically to the industry of architecture and building practice, planning policy, active transportation, and economic development. Without a serious commitment to sustainability and equity internally our own office and in the work we do for our clients we realized it was like we were designing sand castles.

CityMakery is Able City’s non-profit affiliate. The core expertise of CityMakery is to help communities develop quality of life from the ground up, empowering citizens to advocate for their own diverse, equitable, accessible, livable, and sustainable cities.

CityMakery is the solution-builder for citizens — through a methodical path of discovery and definition, we help them assemble a community of like-minded individuals driven toward a common goal. CityMakery works from either end, helping city governments and other public entities implement the policy and programs the citizens have defined for their city.