The foundation for an Academic Practice is based upon the idea that the continuous education of an architect is necessary to optimize the potential of the individual and our practice. We are passionate about cultivating an environment that nurtures this relationship throughout one’s career and have developed a curriculum and a way of working that encourages rigor, discourse and a constant cycle of learning and exploration in our practice. Whether teaching ourselves or the students at OpenLAB Boston every fall, the constant is the intentionality and focus of the lens through which we explore, a hallmark of an academic mindset.
In an immersive environment that is somewhere in-between a school and an office, OpenLAB Boston is a unique collaboration between PAYETTE and The Virginia Tech School of Architecture that offers a radical new and effective pedagogy for architectural education that embeds 4th year BArch students and their studio courses within PAYETTE’s dynamic office culture to learn, experiment, absorb and synthesize multiple facets of architectural practice instantaneously, accelerating their education, understanding of architecture and facilitating an informed entry into the profession. Through the art-of-making, students explore the ethics of architectural form to seek rigorous clarity in concept and detail by applying an epistemological mindset to real-world problems, recognizing the constraints, opportunities and conditions that are part of the design process.
We created OpenLAB Boston to offer a new pedagogical model to the profession and more importantly to seamlessly build upon our passions and the enjoyment and energy that we all get from teaching. So why not teach a studio at PAYETTE? We find that teaching makes us better architects by challenging us to be precise about our intentions, how we synthesize new ideas and by engaging us in delightfully unexpected ways. Over time, we have discovered that the curriculum for OpenLAB Boston and our firm have become more and more one in the same, each informing the others progression. A lecture for the students becomes a lecture for the firm and vice versa. It is a beautiful thing.
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.