Machado Silvetti

Machado Silvetti is an architecture and urban design firm known for distinctive spaces and unique works of architecture in the United States and abroad. Our designs are the result of careful integration of the client’s aspirations, the project’s programmatic requirements, and the nature and character of the place for which a proposal is designed. The work does not espouse any signature style, but strives to find that which is unique and important within a given project, and to express that urbanistically and architecturally. The projects are distinctive for their conceptual clarity and visual intensity.

The firm’s projects have been of diverse size and nature, having developed special expertise in Art Museums, educational institutions, and urban design and planning worldwide for Berlin, Beirut, Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Pamplona, Palermo, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, Tenerife, Venice, Vienna, and in the United States for major cities throughout New England, in New York, Texas, California, Utah, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arkansas among others. In 2008, with the objective of developing projects in Argentina and the rest of Latin America, the firm established an office in Buenos Aires.

In 1991, the firm was given the first ever Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for twenty years of “boldly conceived and brilliantly executed urban projects” and the designs were commended for being “uncompromisingly dedicated to envisioning a meaningful architecture of the public realm.” Since that time, the office has received three National Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects as well as the AIA Brick in Architecture Award, ten Progressive Architecture awards and citations, thirteen design awards from the New England AIA chapter, seventeen Boston Society of Architects awards, including the 2003 Harleston Parker Medal, and the prestigious International Award for Architecture in Stone.

The firm’s designs have been extensively published in professional magazines and displayed in numerous exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Biennale di Venezia, at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., the 1984 I.B.A. Exhibition in Berlin, and at the XVII Triennale di Milano. Three monographs have been produced on the office: Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti: Buildings for Cities(1990), Casas 40: Rodolfo Machado & Jorge Silvetti(1995), and Unprecedented Realism: The Architecture of Machado and Silvetti(1995).

In addition to their architectural practice, principals Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti both teach at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where Mr. Silvetti chaired the Department of Architecture from 1995 to 2002 and Mr. Machado chaired the department of Urban Planning and Design from 2004 to 2009. Additionally, Mr. Silvetti served as a juror for the Pritzker Prize from 1997 to 2004.