Marvel is an architecture, interiors, landscape and urban design practice founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York City, with additional work across the Northeast and Puerto Rico. The firm is known for civic and cultural projects that thread new construction through existing buildings rather than replacing them. Marvel is the architect on the renovation of The Bronx Museum, a project unifying a 1962 former synagogue and a 2006 Arquitectonica wing into one accessible campus behind a new triple-height lobby on the Grand Concourse, with a deep-energy retrofit delivered under New York City’s 80×50 capital program. The practice employs between 51 and 200 people and offers architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, planning and urban design.
The firm’s history reaches back further than its 2013 founding date suggests, and the lineage explains the Puerto Rico work.
In 1959 the architect Thomas Marvel moved to Puerto Rico and founded Marvel & Marchand Architects. In 1992 his son Jonathan Marvel co-founded Rogers Marvel Architects in New York with Rob Rogers. Twenty-one years later, in 2013, the partners split the practice into two independent firms, Marvel Architects and Rogers Partners. In 2015 Marvel Architects formed a partnership with Marvel & Marchand in San Juan, reuniting the two halves of the family practice under one firm.
The transformation after that was disciplinary rather than geographic. In 2019 the office integrated landscape architecture into its design process and promoted Yadiel Rivera-Diaz and Tyler Silvestro to partner, formally becoming Marvel Architects, Landscape Architects, Urban Designers, PLLC while practising as MARVEL. A Richmond office opened in 2022 under Silvestro. In 2023 seven new partners were appointed, bringing the total to twelve. Today the firm runs five locations: New York, San Juan, Richmond, Washington D.C. and Barcelona.
The project list shows what an integrated architecture-and-landscape practice actually takes on. The Northeast Bronx YMCA and the Walter Gladwin Recreation Center, the latter the first full mass timber city-owned public building in New York City. Stonewall House Senior Residences, described by the firm as a place to age with acceptance. The Village Community School expansion, a contemporary addition to a historic building. The Doris Duke Theatre landscape at Jacob’s Pillow. Les Tres Xemeneies, the heart of Catalunya Media City, which is what the Barcelona office is there for. Pierhouse and 1 Hotel in Brooklyn completed back in 2017.
The firm’s stated position is that the pressing problems facing cities, communities and the natural environment can only be solved by working at the intersection of public and private space, and it argues that the greatest opportunities in a project only appear when it is examined from multiple disciplines at once: how planning sets the stage for architecture, and how a landscape and a building interior reinforce each other.
In 2025 the office published the Marvel Almanac, gathering its leadership, disciplines, workgroups, design values and processes into one document, described as both a record and a compass.
