Architectural design, landscape design, master planning, and urban design are all directed toward exploring and enhancing the unique qualities of place. These disciplines offer varied means to create rich social environments by defining and clarifying the public realm. Equally important, each of these disciplines also has a role to play in improving environmental sustainability by minimizing energy use and the consumption of natural resources.

The campus is, in some ways, a laboratory for the exploration and reconstruction of the urban condition. While campuses are often more diffusely built and more verdant than cities, the overarching principles hold true for both: using architecture and landscape to define space, clarify circulation, and link together and accommodate the needs of a disparate range of users, programs, activities, and meanings.

Our plans engage the often disjunctive and sprawling conditions of contemporary campuses and find ways to use increases in density (driven by facilities needs) to strengthen their spatial coherence, making them better places to live and work. In short, we use growth to define public space and create place—establishing a compelling yet flexible long range vision for the campus. Our primary means of accomplishing this is by defining a campus's civic structure—the spatial framework of interconnected campus streets, quadrangles, courtyards, parks, fields, and primary interior spaces that constitutes the campus's public realm and organizes its built fabric.

Good architectural design understands and responds to the unique physical conditions of site, program, and neighboring buildings and spaces, along with user needs, mission, and vision. It brings these disparate elements into accord, creating a physical response that satisfies both the tangible and intangible.

In all of our work, we seek an architecture that is inextricably knitted into its surroundings and that brings out the potential of its program—offering new relationships between users, program, site, district, landscape, interiors, and surrounding public spaces.

We bring architectural inventiveness to each of our projects as well as a thorough understanding of a wide range of facility types, but this is nothing without collaborative engagement with our clients. Understanding all goals for a project—its social and institutional mission as well as its functional and spatial requirements—can only be achieved through an open, collaborative process.

We accomplish this by talking early and often, following up verbal ideas with physical design alternatives that test out concepts and interpretations. The process is cyclical and iterative, as preferred alternatives are continually developed and refined.

Michael Dennis & Associates has been continuously engaged in practice in downtown Boston for 25 years as a sole proprietorship and for 6 years prior to that as the partnership Michael Dennis, Jeffrey Clark & Associates.

Michael's extensive and varied experience in teaching and research has a profound impact on how we approach both design and process.