David M. Schwarz Architects

David M. Schwarz Architects, or DMSAS, is a Washington, D.C. design firm incorporated in 1978. It runs out of a single office on L Street NW and got its start in the city’s historic districts, which still shapes its context-driven approach. The firm has designed concert halls, ballparks, campus buildings, hospitals and mixed-use districts around the country, including Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center, the Smith Center in Las Vegas and the Ballpark at Arlington, plus decades of master planning work in Fort Worth. At Longwood University in Farmville, Va., it’s one of two architects, alongside Calloway Johnson Moore & West, on Lettie Pate Whitehead Hall, a 63,800-sq-ft music building with a 500-seat concert hall.

Performing arts halls are the clearest thread through this practice, and acoustics is the hardest brief in architecture to get wrong quietly. Bass Hall in Fort Worth opened in 1998. Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center followed, along with Severance Hall at Yale and The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas, which was delivered as a LEED Gold project.

Sports venues run on a parallel track that began in 1991 with the Ballpark at Arlington. The firm won the American Airlines Center design competition in 1998 and later designed Dickies Arena in Fort Worth. Concert halls and arenas share a problem — tens of thousands of people arriving and leaving at once — and solving it twice in two different acoustic registers is the firm’s particular specialty.

Fort Worth has been a decades-long relationship rather than a single commission. It started with Cook Children’s Medical Center, the firm’s first major job outside Washington, and extended into the Fort Worth Master Plan and Sundance Square Plaza. Winning a city’s trust at building scale and then being handed its master plan is an unusual trajectory.

Recognition has been individual as well as institutional. Founder David Schwarz received the Richard H. Driehaus Prize in 2015 and the Arthur Ross Award from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in 2014, both for a body of work rather than a single building. The firm’s awards page catalogs roughly 70 honors from 2003 onward, including repeated ICAA John Russell Pope Awards, SARA National Design Awards and Palladio Awards.

Higher-education residential work is a substantial and less visible part of the book: E. Bronson Ingram College, Nicholas S. Zeppos College and Rothschild College at Vanderbilt, plus Mellon Hall and Edensword Hall at St. John’s College in Annapolis.

Current and recent projects include Chevy Chase Lake, The Waycroft in Arlington, Sophia Bethesda in Maryland, Carmichael College in Nashville and Rosewood Le Guanahani in the Caribbean.

The practice also runs programs most firms of its size do not. University Fellowships launched in 2000, the David M. Schwarz Foundation was established in 2007, and Gingertown, an outreach program, began in 2006 and expanded nationally in 2010.

Leadership sits with a founder and chairman plus several principal-managing directors and a chief operating officer, with two principals emeritus still listed. The people page profiles 31 individuals.