With five partners and a payroll of about 70 people, SHoP Architects doesn't quite qualify as a small firm. All the same, it doesn't compare to design-world immensities like Norman Foster's sprawling operation in London or just about any branch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. But last summer, this medium-size Manhattan-based company won a very big project—the new headquarters for Google, the virtual-world behemoth based in Mountain View, Calif.
Will this boost its Web page to a top spot on Google? It will certainly make SHoP more visible everywhere else. For a while now, SHoP has been one of those firms...