William Rawn Associates Architects

William Rawn Associates is a Boston architecture practice known for higher education, performing arts and civic buildings, with a body of work weighted toward institutions that keep their buildings for generations. The firm’s reputation rests substantially on concert hall and academic building design, where acoustics, daylight and long-horizon durability drive the plan more than image does. It works nationally for colleges, universities, arts organizations and municipalities. William Rawn Associates is design architect, with RATIO, on the University of Cincinnati’s Block 1 and Block 2 residence halls at McMillan and Vine, a $326 million complex of four buildings totaling 546,606 square feet and more than 1,300 beds. The scheme steps from five to twelve stories in brick, terracotta, metal and precast concrete.

The office is at 27 School Street in Boston and has stayed a single studio. The practice traces its arc from 1980s community-scale multi-family housing, including housing for the Bricklayers Union in Boston, to a portfolio now past a hundred projects across civic, campus, performing and visual arts, K-12, and health and wellness work.

Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, completed in 1994, is the project the firm itself names as the break that opened it to new building types. The line from that hall through the commissions that followed is easy to trace: the Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke, Klarman Hall at Harvard Business School, the Boylston Street building transformation at the Boston Public Library, and the King Open and Cambridge Street Upper Schools and Community Complex.

Sixteen National AIA Honor Awards sit behind that record, along with multiple Harleston Parker Medals from the Boston Society for Architecture, including the Boston Public Library transformation in 2017 and the Cambridge Public Library in 2010.

The working method leans on physical models used as tools rather than presentation objects, handed to clients and community members so ideas can be tested and consensus built in the room instead of in a review meeting afterwards.

Sustainability commitments are firm-wide rather than project-by-project. William Rawn Associates was an early signatory to the AIA 2030 Challenge, and all design staff are required to maintain LEED accreditation. The practice has also earned the International Living Future Institute’s JUST label, and runs Rawn Equity, Diversity + Inclusion as a standing programme of mentorship, volunteerism and internal education.