In an ever-evolving profession, our advancing staff enriches the work and culture at PAYETTE while cultivating the talent, creativity and growth among the very project teams they make up. With great pleasure we announce the advancement of 8 staff members. We’ve featured one staff member each day over the past couple of weeks. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating their achievements.
Sarah Radding, AIA
Promoted to Associate
Sarah joined PAYETTE in 2004 as part of the PDSI (Physics and DMSE) team at MIT. She quickly established herself as an organizational leader, coordinating teamwork through early construction activities. For the past five years, she has managed the Harvard Art Museums project with Renzo Piano Building Workshop, shepherding this complex project through design, budgetary and political hurdles. Sarah is also a leader in the firm’s Women in Design group and has championed to make PAYETTE a more family-friendly work place. She received her Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan in 1994 and her Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1998.
What inspires you?
Seeing built work that walks that line between clarity and complexity; that is crystalline without being a one-liner; that looks better in the flesh than it does in photographs, because the 2d images can’t do it justice.
What is the best part of your job?
Knowing a little bit about almost every aspect of the Fogg renovation. That is also sometimes the worst part of my job!
What is the most important thing you’ve learned so far?
I can’t begin to answer that definitively, but the thing that springs to mind first is that it is never possible to completely anticipate the finished product when working from drawings to the real thing. There will always be seemingly awkward moments that you fussed over tremendously that turn out to be no big deal. Likewise, there will be conditions that you thought were unobjectionable that end up being unfortunate. I can only hope that as time goes by, the ratio of the former to the latter improves.
The sky is the limit: if you could design or redesign anything, what would it be?
A new building or sculpture somewhere in Rome. The city has a special place in my heart, and to work within its layered historic fabric would be a huge thrill.
8 of 8 in a series about advancing staff members.
We are honored to share PAYETTE has received two 2026 Green Good Design Awards from The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies—Land’s Sake Farm and The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard.
“Green GOOD DESIGN identifies and emphasizes the world’s most important examples of sustainable design and works to develop a public awareness program that informs the general public about which global companies are doing the best job in ecological and sustainable design for our world. Architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning projects, as well as product, packaging, and graphic design projects from over 30 nations were honored with the 2026 Green GOOD DESIGN Award.”
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