select projects
The built environment around us affects the way we feel, the way we work, and the way we live. It affects how we experience life. Moreover, how we build and the materials and systems we choose impact the natural ecosystem —the flora and fauna—that each building joins.
These two concepts underpin our design process and drive our primary intent to create a built environment of beauty and longevity that elevates lives and harmonizes the structured and unstructured world.
work in progress
Working from New Hampshire’s Upper Valley region centered around Dartmouth College, each project is approached as a collaboration — of the occupants, consulting designers, and the tradespeople tasked with producing a highly crafted building. Our design methodology considers programming, siting, and building systems technology. To this intentional process, we bring an architectural expression that is simple in form yet highly expressive in its construction methods and materials. Our work is quintessentially modern yet often shows inspiration from the materials and language of the New England vernacular.
In 2024, Sylvia Richards Practice for Architecture completed the first mass timber laboratory building in New England for antibody technology pioneer Adimab.
Sylvia Richards
Founding Principal
In the two decades after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and prior to founding her Practice for Architecture in 2015, Sylvia Richards defined a unique career path for herself that balanced the responsibilities of family life with carefully selected design projects. Integral to this period was Ms. Richards’ work with exceptional tradespeople: painters, carpenters, small building shops, landscape designers, and furnituremakers. That tenure is part of an intellectual continuum and design ethos, highlighting the importance of understanding materials and the craft of building, which, once Ms. Richards launched her full-time practice, shows its full expression in her firm’s recent work.
Consistent in her work is the visible expression and celebration of the building components that form each project. This three-dimensional “weaving” is rooted in the influence of Ms. Richards’ German mother, whose sewing studio evolved over the decades to include complex quilt-making and the tectonics and products of her weaving looms. Exposure to these applied arts is seen in the layered structure of materials found in Ms. Richards’ buildings. In addition, time spent with her mother-in-law, an Austrian furniture designer with a deep knowledge of European decorative arts of the 20th century, challenged Richards’ thinking about form, material, and color, which can be recognized in her palette of interior finishes, including furnishings.
Sylvia Richards received a Master of Architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College. She is a member of the American Institute of Architects, the Boston Society of Architects, and the International Living Future Institute.
