Another day, another corporate architecture takeover. But this time it’s not the usual suspect, AECOM, which has recently swallowed Davis Langdon, Ellerbe Becket, DMJM, and EDAW. It’s Canada’s largest architecture firm, Stantec (whose stock ticker on the NYSE, for the record, is STN), which already has a total of 10,000 employees in North America and designs behemoth projects ranging from airports to wastewater treatment plants. The firm today announced it was eating up storied SF firm Anshen + Allen. Anshen, famous for building the original Eichler Homes in California, the amazing Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona, and a big chunk of the University of California campuses, still has a firm stronghold in healthcare, education, and research. Recent projects were at Cornell University, UCSF Medical Center, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, and Kaiser Permanente. Some have decried the move as part of architecture’s inexorable march toward just a few “too big to fail” firms. But one of AN’s Deep Throat sees it as a smart move for Anshen in this economy: “Mid-size firms, even larger mid-size firms, are going to have a rough go of it during the next few years,” our source said. “You need a larger platform to keep getting healthcare (and presumably other institutional) work.”