Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, founded in New York in 1986, is a studio known for careful, material-driven cultural buildings. The husband-and-wife practice designs museums, libraries, and academic buildings with a craftsman’s attention to detail and a deliberately unhurried pace. The firm designed the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s Jackson Park, which opened in 2026 after roughly $850 million in construction. TWBTA concentrates on institutional and cultural work, and its buildings tend to favor restraint and permanence over spectacle.

The practice’s design work spans a handful of distinct building types. Alongside the cultural buildings it is best known for, the studio takes on academic buildings, residential architecture, and exhibition design — the last a discipline in its own right, concerned with how objects and visitors share a room rather than with the building envelope. International projects complete the list, so the firm’s scope is not confined to the United States.

Scale is part of the story here. This is a studio of roughly 11 to 50 people, small relative to the profile of its commissions. A practice that size tends to keep its principals close to each project rather than delegating across a large staff, which fits a body of work built on material detail and a deliberate, unhurried pace. The result is a firm whose output is larger in reputation than in headcount.

The pairing of exhibition design with cultural and academic buildings is telling. Museums and universities are exactly the clients who need both the building and the spaces and displays inside it, and a firm fluent in both can carry a project from the walls through to what hangs on them. Based in New York and working internationally, the studio concentrates on institutional and cultural commissions — the kind of work where longevity and careful material choices tend to matter more than novelty, and where a small, focused team is a fit rather than a limitation.

For an institution commissioning a museum, a library, or an academic building, the combination on offer here is specific: a small studio that stays close to its work, fluency in both the architecture and the exhibitions it houses, and a preference for materials and detailing meant to endure. It is a profile suited to clients who measure a building over decades rather than by the attention it draws on opening day.