The Boston Society of Architects recently announced their 2023 Design Award winners and we are proud to have collaborated on eight of the winning projects, including the Harleston Parker Medal!

2023 Harleston Parker Medal Award

Berklee Tower, Berklee College of Music

Boston, MA

Fronting on Massachusetts Avenue, this multi-use 370-bed residence hall for Berklee College of Music strengthens the College’s multiple connections to the City of Boston. The building includes student housing, a 400-seat, two-story Dining Hall serving as a student performance venue overlooking the street, student activity and gathering spaces, ground-floor retail, and the largest recording facility for an educational institution in the country.

The centerpiece of the residence hall is, as summarized by the College’s president, “a performance space that can double as a dining hall by day.” The space is centered on a stage wrapped on three sides by a balcony – like a concert hall or theater. Because the stage is located directly behind the 40-foot glass wall, musicians are highly visible to the city – showcasing the deep talent and energy of the school’s students.

Architect: William Rawn Associates
Lighting Designer: Lam Partners

2023 Built Design Excellence Awards

Residents were eager to preserve a pocket of the rapidly changing neighborhood for public use, and the design team led a broadly inclusive local process involving city leaders, the redevelopment authority, education and arts partners, and a neighborhood advisory committee.

Vacant nearly 20 years, this former steam pump factory is now a vibrant community hub with makerspaces, art and dance studios, food labs and performance spaces that meet the client’s Zero Energy Ready requirements. A mix of office spaces occupy the upper floors, generating public program-enabling income from market-rate tenants. Where gantry cranes were once suspended from wood trusses and machinery hummed, neighbors and artists now gather to learn hip hop, teach carpentry, practice a new language, and inspire students.

Architect: CambridgeSeven
Lighting Designer: Lam Partners

Located in Kendall Square, this project connects co-workers across the 14 floors of a new flagship, built-to-suit tower that contains workspace across ten floors, with amenities and support spaces comprising the balance.

The project’s design narrative embraces the location by centering on the evolution of technology with technological advancements organized chronologically from top to bottom, starting with early tactical interventions at the lower floors and evolving to more ephemeral advancements of technology on the upper floors.

Architect: Utile, Inc. and Merge Architects
Lighting Designer: Lam Partners

10 Fan Pier is an expansion of the client’s presence in Boston, honoring their long and proud history with a landmark destination and an inspiring work environment. Designed to house 1,200 staff members, the 17-story office building offers ground-floor, publicly accessible restaurant and retail, and an outdoor plaza along the Harborwalk and busy Fan Pier Marina. The building demonstrates a commitment to environmental advancement—flexible, healthy, and able to adapt to future needs.
Indoor environmental quality is maintained by monitoring CO2 levels, providing increased ventilation, and selecting low-VOC materials. The building as a whole is similarly responsive—high-performance, low-emissivity glazing contributes to the efficient exterior envelope that, coupled with high-performance mechanical systems, creates a building that achieves LEED Platinum.

Architect: Elkus Manfredi
Lighting Designers: Lam Partners; Sladen Feinstein Integrated Lighting

Over the past two decades, Kendall Square has developed from an area of parking lots and industrial brown fields into a new center within the Boston/Cambridge metropolis. This has created an opportunity to define and transform the threshold between East Cambridge and MIT’s campus at Main Street with a gateway and a new public open space. The plan included a commission for a new gateway canopy that connects Main Street and the new open space—hosting the MBTA Kendall/MIT subway stop. The Kendall/MIT Gateway creates a threshold that acknowledges the depth of the block from Main Street all the way into the campus, a condition that few gateways have historically been asked to address. The infrastructure of the project consists of the subway rail line, the concourse underground, as well as three modes of access to the street level.

Architect: NADAAA
Lighting Designers: Lam Partners; SoSo Limited

The Upham’s Corner Comfort Station is an adaptive reuse and historic preservation project that converts a long-abandoned but thoughtfully designed public comfort station, constructed in 1912, into a vessel for exploring and celebrating contemporary immigrant culture in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.

The design transforms historic public infrastructure from a long-past era into a soft and open platform for contemplating diverse cultural narratives and imagining a shared future through the lens of food. The tiny and neutral restaurant interior conveys a tone of soft openness to the stories and histories embedded in the innovative menu and remarkable journeys that brought the chef-owners and the surrounding community to America.

Architect: Supernormal
Lighting Designer: Lam Partners

For more than three decades, the Davis Center has been the physical, intellectual, and programmatic heart of campus-wide efforts to build inclusive community on the Williams campus. The reimagined 26,350-square-foot Davis Center encompasses a major new addition, as well as comprehensive, deep-energy retrofit renovations of the beloved Rice and Jenness Houses, creating a center with universal access and increased space to accommodate Minority Coalition (MinCo) student gatherings, meetings, dialogue, classes, socializing, and studying.

The Davis Center also houses a new large gathering and event space to host the wide range of campus and public programs, as well as student group meeting spaces, staff office space to accommodate program growth, and expanded kitchens for cultural and student group use.

Architect: Leers Weinzapfel Associates Architects
Lighting Designer: Lam Partners

The Conservation Legacy Center for the non-profit National Museum of Forest Service History in Missoula, Montana, will educate the public about the history and ongoing conservation work of the United States Forest Service (USFS). The design is inspired by the qualities of these forests as valuable recreational and economic resources throughout history; it also echoes features of the local surrounding mountain landscape.

The Center will be itself an exhibit, featuring representative wood species throughout the United States, wood products developed with USFS Forest Products Lab, and an array of mass timber products such as glulams, cross laminated timber (CLT), and Mass Plywood Panels (MPP). The predominantly wood building represents a new focus on sustainable ways of building, with low embodied carbon, renewable materials, and carbon sequestration.

Architect: Leers Weinzapfel Associates Architects