i know quite a few people that work at perry dean and have
been there for years. they were the associate architect on the ica.
and seem to do alot of that kind of work. if you want i can maybe
get you in touch with someone there.

machado silvetti...what's to say? they do good work.
Moshe Safdie is in a slightly remote location in somerville...if you're
taking public transportation. if you live around there it's great.

heard good things abot leers and ksw...don't know about the others.

i'd also reccomend working for charles rose..but i don't know how
large their office is at this point...the facility is nice, but not sure
about the number of people.

lars

Thanks. Perry Dean also did the Holl MIT Dorm and has a Moneo project coming. I have actually had their monograph for a long time. I will email you, any help would be awesome.

office dA. they're doing some really great stuff and getting built.

but they're not a mid-sized firm are they? i always thought
that office was 8 or so people and usually harvard grads...
not true?

oh. less progressive, but my friend has had a good experience there is William Rawn's office... a tad more corporate but you'll get to work on larger projects...

Ann Beha(sp?) seems to get high marks from my friends too. Not sure of the size of their office.

I'm way too late, but if someone else is moving to beantown... Sasaki is great if you love sustainability. CBT sucks. It's a giant office with mediocre work. Office dA is awesome, but I knew some people who worked there. They are all young out of school interns who work constantly. One guy I knew was in charge of competitions. He got burned out and doesn't even work in architecture anymore. The other guy worked late for weeks then came in Monday morning at 9 instead of 8 and was yelled at for preventing the entire office from working besides the fact that he had working 16 hour days for about three weeks and also the Sunday night before. They do great stuff, but the employees are abused. Moshe Safdie is good, but Moshe can be kind of a jerk. I don't know much about Machado Silvetti, but they do good stuff. kyu sung woo is a small boutique with mostly some local new england projects and then stuff in korea.

Payette Assoc., Chan and Krieger, Cambridge 7 are also some excellent and interesting firms to certainly consider!

jzxy, this guy arclem must have gotten his/her job by now, otherwise it'll be sad.

Fulcrum,
That guy and others may also like to jump over to the others by now or near future. Good to have more places as options.

well, in that case (I'm all for helping others :)
I've heard that several firms here in Boston have laid off recently. I guess the slow economy is finally catching on to us. That means it's good time to go back to school... or stay in school.

any more info on beha? i really like alot of their projects, the competitions definitely a plus, but they seem to do a lot of histo-pres.

@holz.box: this is coming from a decidedly biased position, but it seems worth mentioning that many of the more contemporary projects featured on ann beha's website (daniel arts center, skillman library, arkell museum, clemson architectural center & mars encounter competitions, etc.) were designed and completed by a studio team that left her office two years ago to form my office, designLAB architects. i cannot say whether this has much affected the kind of work they are doing now or not, as i don't know. they do now and have always done a fairly substantial amount of historic preservation work, but my understanding is that the office is run on a studio system, so if preservation isn't your thing you probably won't have to do much of it.

@fokt: i wouldn't have described kyu sung woo as a small boutique - last time i was in their office they seemed to be around 20-25 people, working as you said primarily on mid-sized projects in the northeast and large projects in korea.

i spent a few months at machado-silvetti last year helping out with a couple of competitions. at the time they were around 35 people, although i know they've at times been as large as 50. the office culture is great, and they've built enough of a name for themselves that they can consistently get interesting projects. jorge and rodolpho have a pretty hierarchical, top-down style of management, so it's probably a better place to gain early work experience (like me) than to build a career as an associate. the only really bad thing about working there was the way they handled technology - almost all of the computers were 5 years or more old, and they purchase new ones at a snail's pace, so tech issues were a daily headache there.

i have a friend at CBT who has echoed the sentiments expressed above - he absolutely hates it there. office dA seems to be great for some and horrible for others - definitely doing really interesting work, but you're expected to work 60 hr/wk at a minimum and some get burned out on that quickly. between nader teaching at MIT and monica teaching at GSD, they do tend to mostly hire their former students.

Snark,
Thanks for the info. Probably not moving to boston, but it’s always simmering in the back of my mind.