Schwartz/Silver Architects

Schwartz/Silver Architects is a Boston practice of about 25 people, founded by Warren Schwartz and Robert Silver, that concentrates on cultural and academic buildings. The firm designs museums, libraries, academic and civic buildings, and does a substantial amount of adaptive reuse and historic renovation, along with specialist consulting on collections storage. Work spans New England and the rest of the country, including several commissions under the GSA’s Design Excellence Program. Warren Schwartz is a GSA National Design Peer and FAIA, and Angela Ward Hyatt was elevated to FAIA in 2023. Current and recent projects include the Boston Holocaust Museum, the Medford Public Library, and work at 87 Trumbull Street for Yale University. The firm is architect of record on the Brandywine Museum of Art campus expansion with Kengo Kuma & Associates.

The partnership predates the firm by seven years. Warren Schwartz and Robert Silver met at Perry, Dean and Stewart in the 1970s but did not actually work together until 1973, at the young office of Charles Hilgenhurst & Associates, where colleagues nicknamed them the pencil and the eraser. Schwartz brought expressive ideas and intuition, Silver a systematic counterweight, and the two settled disagreements by arguing them out. They founded Schwartz/Silver in 1980 and built an early reputation for modern but deferential work on historic buildings and for untangling difficult renovation problems. Forty-five years on, a newer generation of principals leads the practice areas: Mark Schatz on academic work, Peter Kleiner on civic, Angela Ward Hyatt on libraries and Jon Traficonte on museums and cultural projects.

Each of those groups has real depth behind it. The museum practice has completed more than forty projects and consults nationally, to museums and to other architects, on spaces and equipment for collections storage, a specialty few design firms carry in house. The academic side works for national research universities including Princeton, Yale, Brown and the University of Virginia, alongside public and private colleges and secondary schools. The award record runs back decades: AIA National Honor Awards for the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge, the Hyde Park Branch Library in Boston, the Firehouse Arts Center in Newburyport, 360 Newbury Street with Frank O. Gehry and Associates, and the House at Tanglewood; a 2025 SCUP/AIA special citation for 87 Trumbull Street at Yale; library design honors for Shain Library at Connecticut College; and General Services Administration citations for the A. H. McCoy Federal Building in Jackson, Mississippi. More recent civic work includes fire stations in Walpole and Newton and the River Center Branch Library in Baton Rouge, a joint venture with WHLC Architecture. The office describes itself as a design firm run on a service firm model, holding the same design team on a commission from start to finish rather than rotating staff between phases.