AtkinsRéalis Brand Guidelines: SNC’s 1911 Montreal Office, Atkins of 1938 & a 2023 Name

A Montreal engineer, hydro power and a rival called Lavalin.

AtkinsRéalis is the name, since September 2023, of the Montreal engineering group long known as SNC-Lavalin. Its roots go back to 1911, when the engineer Arthur Surveyer opened a consulting office in Montreal, Arthur Surveyer & Cie, English Wikipedia says. Surveyer had studied in Belgium and at Polytechnique Montréal, and his early work was in hydroelectric power: with his partner Augustin Frigon he designed and supervised a power station on the Saint-Maurice River, and the firm went on to work in pulp and paper, mining and metallurgy.

In 1937 Surveyer took two partners, Emil Nenniger and Georges Chênevert. After the Second World War the firm took the name Surveyer, Nenniger & Chênevert — in 1946 according to English Wikipedia and in 1947 according to French Wikipedia — and its initials became SNC. Its first international contract, in 1963, was the Idukki power station in Kerala, India, English Wikipedia says, and in the 1960s the firm worked on Hydro-Québec’s Manic-5 project on the Manicouagan River.

Its main Canadian rival had a parallel history. The engineers Jean-Paul Lalonde and Romeo Valois founded Lalonde, Valois in 1936; it became Lavalin in 1972, a name built from syllables of the original, and in the 1970s it designed and built the fabric roof of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. After Lavalin ran into financial difficulty, the two firms merged in August 1991 as SNC-Lavalin, French Wikipedia says. French Wikipedia also records that SNC had bought the state ammunition maker Les Arsenaux canadiens in 1986, and that SNC-Lavalin sold that business, by then called SNC Technologies, to General Dynamics in February 2006.

A British surname and a coined word.

The other half of the name comes from Britain. William Atkins founded W. S. Atkins & Partners in London in 1938, with offices in Westminster and a focus on civil and structural engineering, English Wikipedia says. During the Second World War the firm carried out engineering work under wartime conditions, including a patented anti-aircraft turret, and in 1945 it was asked to consult on the expansion of the Port Talbot steelworks in Wales. It gave up contracting in 1950 to concentrate on design and project management, and later worked on the Berkeley nuclear power station, Drax power station and the Channel Tunnel, according to the same source. The firm joined the London Stock Exchange in 1996, bought the cost consultancy Faithful+Gould that year and traded simply as Atkins from 2002.

SNC-Lavalin grew by acquisition in the 2010s. English Wikipedia lists the commercial reactor division of Atomic Energy of Canada in 2011, which became Candu Energy; the Irish engineering firm Kentz in 2014; and Atkins in 2017. In 2021 the group sold its oil and gas business, including the former Atkins and Kentz oil and gas units.

On 13 September 2023 the group announced that SNC-Lavalin, Atkins and Faithful+Gould would all become AtkinsRéalis, The Construction Index reported that day. The chief executive, Ian Edwards, said the name joined the Atkins legacy brand with “Réalis,” inspired by Montreal and the company’s French-Canadian roots and meant to evoke the word “realise.” The new name went onto communications at once and onto the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker ATRL, with the legal change left to shareholders at the following year’s annual meeting; English Wikipedia says that approval came in 2024. The same month, Ground Engineering reported that SYSTRA had taken over Atkins’ Swedish, Danish and Norwegian businesses, about 770 staff in 12 offices.

Design and documentation.

Engineering and infrastructure consultancies sell expertise rather than objects, so their identities have to stand in for work that is often invisible once it is finished: a tunnel, a water network or a power connection. Most of them present themselves with restraint. Their wordmarks tend to be short, set in a clean sans, and many are acronyms, founders’ surnames or invented names left over from mergers. Colour is usually limited to one strong tone, often a blue, an orange or a green, used against plenty of white space.

The pictures do much of the talking. Websites and reports in this field lean on project photography of bridges, rail lines and stations, water and wastewater works, energy plants and city districts, often taken wide and from the air so that the scale of the work is clear. People appear as teams on site or in the studio rather than as models, and diagrams, maps and drawings sit beside the photographs.

The structure of the websites is similar from firm to firm. Pages are commonly organised by sector, such as transport, water, energy, buildings and industry, and by service, such as design, engineering, project management and advisory work. Sustainability usually has a section of its own, and careers pages carry a large share of the message, since these businesses depend on recruiting architects, engineers and other specialists.

Much of the brand also lives in documents. Listed consultancies publish annual reports and sustainability reports, and many put out technical papers, research reports, indexes and case studies on individual projects. Typography in those documents is usually plain and functional, with charts and tables carrying the detail, so the identity has to work as well on a page of figures as on a hoarding around a building site.

Court records, rail lines and a high-speed consortium.

The rename followed more than a decade of legal cases, recorded by English Wikipedia and in official releases. In September 2013 the World Bank barred SNC-Lavalin and its affiliates from bidding on its projects after an inquiry into bids for the Padma Bridge in Bangladesh; in February 2017 an Ontario court acquitted the former employees charged in Canada over that project. In 2015 Canadian police charged the group and two affiliates with corruption and fraud over contracts in Libya between 2001 and 2011. On 18 December 2019, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada announced, SNC-Lavalin Construction pleaded guilty to one count of fraud; the court imposed a fine and a three-year probation order requiring the group to maintain and strengthen its compliance programme, and the remaining charges against all three companies were stayed. In May 2022, English Wikipedia says, the company reached a deferred prosecution agreement to settle charges over a repair contract for Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge in the early 2000s.

Its projects include the Canada Line in Vancouver, completed in 2009, English Wikipedia says, and the group is one of the lead partners in the Rideau Transit Group that built Ottawa’s Confederation Line, opened in September 2019. In October 2026 Railway Gazette reported AtkinsRéalis as the engineering firm in Cadence, the consortium working with the crown corporation Alto on a planned high-speed line between Toronto and Québec City, alongside CDPQ Infra, Keolis, SYSTRA, SNCF Voyageurs and Air Canada; Cadence had asked train makers for expressions of interest that September.

For a design guide, AtkinsRéalis shows how a merged group can build a new name from an inherited one: a British founder’s surname joined to a coined word that points to Montreal. Compare WSP, another consultancy with a Quebec root, and SYSTRA, which took over Atkins’ Scandinavian businesses. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate grey and a warm copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AtkinsRéalis’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.