Can strict technical requirements and elegant design coexist? Jay Siebenmorgen says yes. As Design Partner at NBBJ, Jay has spent over 30 years working on hospitals, research labs, and higher education buildings — some of the most technically demanding spaces in architecture — and made beauty a non-negotiable.
Jay walks through the exploratory design process behind 325 Binney Street — Moderna's Kendall Square headquarters — including the massing studies, zoning constraints, and the five-story atrium his team fought to carve into a famously deep floor plate. He also talks through Mass General's new Ragon Building, a 1.4-million-square-foot academic medical center more than a decade in the making, and the McLean Hospital project that proves great design doesn't require a big budget — just discipline.
Along the way, Jay gets into what makes institutional design different: buildings that have to function under enormous technical and regulatory pressure while still feeling humane, beautiful, and calming to the people inside them. He also opens up about teaching graduate design studios for over a decade, what mentorship has taught him about running a 650-person firm, and the leap — three years ago — from top designer to partner, and everything that leap forced him to learn that architecture school never did.
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