by SFS Architecture, Inc.
As she looks forward to her retirement, Marsha leaves behind not just buildings, but a blueprint for a successful, purpose-driven architecture practice with a strong culture and seasoned leadership ready to guide the firm toward new opportunities and growth.
For more than thirty years, Marsha Hoffman has led SFS Architecture through an era defined by purpose, collaboration, and community impact. Her career reflects resilience and a passion for creating spaces where lives intersect and futures take shape, not only for clients but for the culture of SFS itself. As a Principal and Partner at SFS, Marsha broke barriers as a pioneering woman in architecture. She guided the company through a variety of challenges with the firm emerging stronger and more resilient each time.
As Marsha prepares to retire at the end of 2025, she can look back with immense pride on a career that has positively impacted people and communities, elevated women in design and shared a leadership journey with her business partner and friend, Kerry Newman.
From religious and higher education institutions to U.S. Courts, nonprofits, and evolving workplaces, Hoffman championed projects that demanded strategy, vision, and precision. Each project presented unique challenges, and each solution reflected a commitment to quality architecture. This work touched countless communities, congregations, families, government employees, and nonprofit organizations with each project an opportunity to make a tangible difference.
One example is the Christopher S. Bond U.S. Courthouse in Jefferson City, where design addressed circulation, safety, and security for judges, jurors, officers, detainees, and the public while the design embodies permanence and significance. In civic and academic spaces such as the Donald J. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Lee’s Summit City Hall, and Ottawa University’s Gangwish Library and Gibson Student Center, Hoffman led teams that integrated emerging technologies to keep clients forward-thinking and future-ready. Flexibility and scalability were always part of the design, ensuring that growth could be realized without compromise.
Marsha’s leadership on scores of religious projects and teams has reached across the region, with each project requiring expertise, focus, and passion to execute. The projects have included renovations, additions, historic preservation and restoration, and new construction. Each one of these were crafted with careful attention to materiality and natural lighting to create reverent worship and gathering spaces such as St. James Catholic Church and School.
Marsha’s impact extended beyond design, driving cultural transformation in the workplace, such as the collaboration with the General Services Administration Region 6 Headquarters. By introducing and testing progressive workplace strategies—such as hoteling, teleworking, hybrid meetings, and paperless workflows—Marsha led teams that helped federal agencies reduce space needs and improve efficiency before these concepts became mainstream.
SFS embraced many of these strategies and adopted our current open studio model in 2015 to foster collaboration and equity. This approach laid the groundwork for a smooth transition to remote work during the pandemic but also a space that welcomed the firm back to the office. Today, workplace design continues to evolve, and SFS continues creating office spaces where people want to be.
We celebrate Marsha’s career with deep gratitude for her contributions. For more than 50 years, SFS has stood for meaningful collaboration, thoughtful planning, and impactful design – a legacy that will endure as Kerry, Brian, Kelly, Kwame, and Dana continue building upon the foundations laid by our past leaders.
As she looks forward to her retirement, Marsha leaves behind not just buildings, but a blueprint for a successful, purpose-driven architecture practice with a strong culture and seasoned leadership ready to guide the firm toward new opportunities and growth.
