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MASS Design Group announces acquisition of long-time Santa Fe collaborator Atkin Olshin Schade Architects

2022-11-16T12:03:00-05:00

MASS Design Group has announced its acquisition of Santa Fe, New Mexico-based Atkin Olshin Schade Architects (AOS) in a move they say will offer an enhancement of the relationship the two have built already through years of collaboration.

The merger makes the new combined entity Santa Fe’s largest architectural office, with further opportunity to leverage AOS’s Philadelphia operation in order to pursue “innovative approaches to preservation, adaptive reuse, and design for mission-focused organizations throughout the northeast and nationally.”

Previously on Archinect: MASS Design Group founder Michael Murphy announces he is stepping down, will join the faculty at Georgia Tech

It comes just under a month after MASS’s co-founder Michael Murphy left the firm to take a position on faculty at Georgia Tech University, handing over the reins to his former Senior Principal and Managing Director Christian Benimana and Patricia Gruits as well as the firm’s co-founder and current Chief Design O...

MASS Design founder Michael Murphy announces he is stepping down, will join the faculty at Georgia Tech

2022-10-10T11:30:00-04:00

MASS Design Group President and co-founder Michael Murphy has announced he will be stepping down from his post after 15 years to pursue new academic and professional initiatives in a move announced on Friday.

The announcement stated that MASS will continue under the leadership of Senior Principals and Managing Directors Christian Benimana and Patricia Gruits and Founding Principal and Chief Design Officer Alan Ricks. Murphy will now join the faculty at Georgia Tech as its new Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair.

The recent AIA Firm Award winners have become recognized throughout the design community for their commitment to restorative social justice projects and three core guiding principles of beauty, dignity, and the increased flow of natural air best exemplified in their designs for the Butaro District Hospital and subsequent commissions across Rwanda and the United States.

Previously on Archinect: new documentary tells the story behind MASS Design Group's cholera clinic ...

'Beauty matters': MASS Design Group featured on 60 Minutes

2022-09-07T13:13:00-04:00

Lesley Stahl: Do you think that COVID will change architecture for everybody? Michael Murphy: Everyone around the world is going through a shift in their understanding of the buildings around us. That they may make us sicker, that they could make us healthier if they were better designed.

MASS founding principal and executive director Michael Murphy discussed the curative father-son restoration project that led to his enrollment at Harvard and subsequent experience with the firm’s award-winning early Butaro District Hospital project in Rwanda, which helped cement the place of air flow as one of its three simple design mandates long before the impacts of COVID-19 were noted across the industry.

Murphy's desire to give back to his hometown of Poughkeepsie through various retrofit projects is also highlighted along with a site visit to the in-progress Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture campus, which comes well-appointed with furnishings created by Managing Director Christian Benimana's MASS.Made studio in Kigali. “Beauty matters,” Murphy told 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl finally about the approach that led to last year's AIA Firm Award win. “Spaces...

MASS Design's Michael Murphy says we're failing to learn the epidemic design lessons Florence Nightingale provided 150 years ago

2021-12-29T16:39:00-05:00

At our peril, we have ignored Nightingale’s prescriptions. The history of the hospital contains clear lessons about the importance of air movement through buildings, the public health risks of poor design, and the dangers of technological reliance. Architecture professionals should look back to see what else has been forgotten or ignored in the race to merge art and technology. Whose lives might be at stake if they don’t?

Murphy is a principal at Boston-based MASS Design Group and the author of The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity, which accompanies the firm’s recent exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics on view at the Cooper Hewitt until February 23rd.

In it, Murphy argues that the COVID pandemic has affected a new paradigm in the ways architects and healthcare designers think about hospitals that are reliant on air, either cooled or circulated by mechanical systems, and failed in their attempts to mitigate the virus’ spread by fenestration that is now an impediment to the application of effective inpatient treatment.

Interior of MASS Design Group's Butaro Hospital in Ruhengeri, Rwanda. Photo: Iwan Baan.

“Like all crises that reveal cracks in the system, the pandemic has prompted a public reckoning with the role of buildings in shaping our health. Recent reporting is waking up to the crisis of breathability in buildings, raising questi...