A leading figure in the architecture industry is being mourned after Payette announced the passing of its founder Tom Payette last week at the age of 90.

Payette was considered an innovator in the design of healthcare facilities and scientific high-ed buildings, garnering a consistent stream of AIA national awards and the admiration of the hundreds of other practitioners he came to collaborate with on similar projects via the entity that became his eponymous firm. 

“Tom was courageous, no challenge was unachievable, and no disappointment could phase him,” his colleague and current Payette President Kevin Sullivan remembered. “He encouraged us to do remarkable things, always looking forward, never dwelling on the past and always encouraging us to do great design, but most importantly, never allowing us to forget the importance of family and maintaining a life beyond architecture.”

Payette earned his bachelor’s degree in structural engineering at Michigan State University before entering the Harvard GSD in the mid-1950s, studying there during the influential deanship of Josep Lluís Sert before starting his career in Markus & Nocka’s Boston office in 1960. 

It was there, after being named the firm’s president at just 33 years of age, that Payette began to leave his mark through a number of hospital commissions around the New England region. His leadership eventually reflected in a name change in 1974, and the office grew from 40 members to a staff of over 100 in the span of two and a half decades.  

Seminal works like the Aga Khan University Hospital and Medical College in Karachi, Pakistan, have cemented a legacy reflected of having “transformed healthcare architecture into healthcare 'design' — into architecture with a capital ‘A’,” according to the firm’s Principal George Marsh, Jr. 

“His architecture had an amazing humanistic quality, manifest by an intimate connection to landscape, ample daylight and views to the outside, spatial and planimetric clarity, and a robust yet warm sense of materiality,” Mark Careage said of his former mentor. “These buildings are friendly and welcoming, and though they exhibit humbleness and simplicity, they are also grand and monumental when they need to be. This is especially apparent at the Aga Khan University campus in Karachi. It is a tricky thing to balance the institutional and the human scales. Tom’s architecture makes it look easy.”

“He was a second father to me — a patriarch of the profession, of wisdom, energy, advice, and the model of the architect,” Marsh added finally. “His legacy lives beyond buildings. It is the advancement and celebration of the practice of architecture, and making places for all to enjoy.”