Eric Davenport, AIA, NCARB.

The architect behind LEAP

Eric Davenport founded LEAP Architecture on March 15, 2012, after years of watching good projects get diluted by handoffs — a designer here, a drafter there, a principal who appeared only at the contract signing. He built LEAP around the opposite model: one registered architect who listens in the first meeting, draws the plans, files the permits, and answers the contractor's phone call from the site.

The studio's name is the mission statement — Living Environments, Appropriate Projects. Eric chooses commissions where design can genuinely move the needle: family homes planned for decades of changing life, nonprofit facilities where every saved operating dollar funds the mission, and workplaces where the architecture measurably improves how teams perform.

A builder's architect

Contractors like working with Eric for the same reason clients do: the drawings are thorough, the details are buildable, and the answers come fast. That translation skill — between the poetry of a design idea and the reality of a two-by-ten — is why LEAP projects come in on budget and why the finished building matches the rendering.

The sustainability throughline

Eric approaches every project as a building scientist first: envelope, orientation, and daylight before equipment and gadgets. LEAP holds its work to the goals of the 2030 Challenge — the industry-wide commitment to carbon-neutral buildings — and helps every client stack the NYSERDA, New Jersey Clean Energy, and federal incentives their project qualifies for.

Off the drafting table

When he isn't walking a site, Eric is usually explaining to a client why the cheapest week of any project is the one spent planning — or sketching the next iteration of a detail that nobody will ever notice and everyone will feel.