The Architects
Overview
Founded in 1967, the firm's work includes the design of educational, health care and correctional facilities; highway infrastructure, transit station and related facilities; housing development and a variety of large scale urban planning commissions nationwide.
Locally, Stull and Lee designed United South End Settlements on the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues, South Station, and Northeastern's John D. O'Bryant African American Institute among many others.
Lee (left) and Stull 1987
Stull & Lee studio logo
Donald Stull
"Don was an activist architect, our vision was to use the land to develop our community, and he helped craft that vision"
Bio
Donald L. Stull, born in 1937 in Springfield, attended Ohio State University, earning a B.S. degree in architecture in 1961. Two years later, he received a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. The next four years he developed his skills with the Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, & then Samuel Glaser Associates.
In the mid-1960s, Stull established himself as a solo architect and planner for both public and private agencies to meet the needs of a “new Boston,” as a case of urban renewal. Then in 1990, M. David Lee, a graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, joined Stull, and the firm became Stull & Lee.
"To have people of color representing other people of color, that was a real opportunity"
David Lee
Bio
Encouraged by his family, he attended the University of Illinois for architecture.
After graduation, he began working for David A. Crane and Partners, a Philadelphia-based firm that did a lot of work in African American neighborhoods.
The firm, he remembers, coined the phrase “urban design". Lee acknowledges he loved what he was doing at the time, but wanted to attend grad school.
He was accepted to Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Before he moved to Boston, his former employer encouraged him to give Donald Stull a call. Needing a summer job, Lee reached out to Stull, who had graduated from the same program years earlier. After his own graduation, Lee joined Stull full-time.
Media
David Lee Lecture from Boston Architectural College on Vimeo.
