Leers Weinzapfel Associates

Leers Weinzapfel Associates Architects is a Boston practice founded in 1982 by Andrea Leers and Jane Weinzapfel, known for campus, civic and infrastructure buildings and for treating utility plants and service structures as architecture rather than as sheds. It was the first women-owned firm to win the AIA Architecture Firm Award, in 2007. The office is on Kneeland Street in the Leather District and works mainly across the Northeast. The firm is associate architect on MIT’s Metropolitan Warehouse conversion with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a project that turns a 500-foot-long 1894 storage building with two-foot masonry walls into 200,000 square feet of studios, classrooms and makerspace for the School of Architecture and Planning. Shawmut Design and Construction is construction manager. The building opened in August 2026 and targets LEED Gold.

A note on how the practice describes itself, which is more specific than most firm statements.

Leers Weinzapfel positions its work at the juncture of architecture, landscape, urban design and infrastructure, and says it brings inventiveness to dramatically complex conditions, meeting them with design clarity, refinement and intelligence. That fourth term, infrastructure, is the one that separates the office from its Boston peers and explains the utility plants, service structures and campus systems in the portfolio.

The office is at 75 Kneeland Street, Suite 301, Boston, MA 02111, on the edge of the Leather District, with a main line of +1-617-423-5711. The firm’s own site organises its account of itself under Approach, Commitments, People, Client Partners and Awards. Client Partners as a named category rather than a project list is a small signal about how the practice sees repeat institutional relationships.

Portfolio submissions are handled through the careers address and the firm asks for a single PDF under 10MB containing a cover letter, resume and work samples. It states plainly that it does not accept solicitations for commercial goods and services at that address.