Vinci Hamp Architects is a Chicago practice specializing in historic preservation, restoration and adaptive reuse, working from a single studio on West Ohio Street. The partnership of John Vinci and Philip Hamp formed in 1995, carrying forward a practice lineage that reaches back to 1970, and the firm remains deliberately small at fewer than ten people. Its work concentrates on landmark buildings where the constraint is fabric rather than program: museum and exhibition design, institutional restoration and residential commissions. Philip Hamp leads the restoration of the Illinois State Capitol north wing in Springfield, a project that stripped the wing to its 1868 stonework and is reinstating a stained glass ceiling above the Senate chamber. Recent work includes the Rothko Pavilion at the Portland Art Museum, completed in 2025, and the Tribune Tower conversion in Chicago.
Museum work is a distinct line of business at Vinci Hamp, separate from the building restorations the firm is better known for. The practice has designed temporary exhibitions and gallery reinstallations for the Art Institute of Chicago, the Drawing Room at the Arts Club of Chicago, exhibition spaces at Wrightwood 659, the Secrist | Beach gallery, and The Jazz Age in New York. That gallery-scale work sits alongside larger museum commissions such as the Rothko Pavilion and the Paine Art Center’s Conservatory.
The published portfolio is organized in four groups – institutional, museums, preservation and residential – and the same building often turns up in two of them. Institutional and preservation projects include the Illinois Governor’s Mansion in Springfield, the Graham Foundation and the University Club of Chicago, an Illinois General Assembly hearing room, University Galleries in Normal, the Robert R. McCormick House in Wheaton and the Belden-Stratford. Residential commissions run from Chicago apartments and townhouses to a house in Three Oaks, Michigan and another at Fontana, Wisconsin.
The staff list explains how a practice this size takes on landmark projects: nearly everyone is licensed. Philip Hamp holds FAIA, LEED AP BD+C and NCARB credentials. Principals David Hrabal, Paul Kraemer and Alex Krikhaar are AIA, as are associate Chris Bartek and architect Ivan Silvestre. Tony Prom and Benjamin Vargas work as designers. John Vinci, FAIA, is principal emeritus.
Hamp’s route into preservation was deliberate. He took a bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1976 and a Master of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1980, served internships with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Historic American Buildings Survey, joined the Office of John Vinci in 1980, and partnered with Vinci fifteen years later. He has taught historic preservation at the University of Illinois at Chicago, sat on the board of Landmarks Illinois and on the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council, was elected to the AIA College of Fellows in 2006, and serves on the advisory group of the AIA’s Committee on Design. Vinci took his Bachelor of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1960 and was elected to the College of Fellows in 1992; his restoration credits include Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio in Oak Park, and his new buildings include the Arts Club of Chicago and the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame.
Henneman Engineering, which led the design team for the Illinois State Capitol west wing, names Vinci Hamp as the historic preservation and restoration design architect on that project – the first state capitol to be awarded LEED Gold certification. General and job inquiries go to vha@vinci-hamp.com.
