Machado and Silvetti Associates, Inc. is a forty-person architecture and urban design firm known for distinctive spaces and unique works of architecture in the United States and abroad. The form and image of the designs result from the particular client and project, and the specific needs and place for which a proposal is designed. The work does not espouse any single architectural 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.
Machado and Silvetti Associates became incorporated in 1985, although principals Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti have been in association since 1974. The firm’s projects have been of diverse size and nature, and include urban design and planning for Berlin, Buenos Aires, Leonforte (Sicily), Frankfurt, San Juan, Singapore, Palermo, Venice, Vienna, and in the United States for Boston, Dallas, Houston, New York, Portland, and San Francisco.
Completed projects include, among others: Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Park in Battery Park City, New York; a comprehensive master plan, a 267-bed dormitory, and a parking structure for Princeton University; a museum for the University of Utah; a branch of the Boston Public Library; a landmark tower for the University of Cincinnati; a new 43-acre medical campus plan for the University of California San Francisco; and a drive-in restaurant prototype for Sonic Restaurants. Three projects are under construction, the Wiess College dormitory and dining halls for Rice University, graduate student housing for Harvard University, and the $150 million center for comparative archeology at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California.
Ongoing design work by Machado and Silvetti Associates includes: museum planning for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame; a studio art facility for the University of Virginia; South Boston Waterfront Park for the Massachusetts Port Authority in Boston; a nine-story housing project in Santander, Spain; a mixed-use building at the Boston Center for the Arts in Massachusetts; a campus master plan for the American University in Beirut; and a development master plan for the five block Con Ed plant site on Manhattan’s East River.
In 1991, the firm was given the First 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 awards from the American Institute of Architects, eight Progressive Architecture awards and citations, five Boston Society of Architects awards, seven design awards from the New England AIA chapter, as well as design awards in Argentina, France, Germany, and Italy.
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 chairs the Department of Architecture.
March 18, 2002
