About Jeff

Professionally, I’m a Boston Area Architectural Designer and Illustrator.  I’m trained as an architect,  and I have been in the field of architecture, full time, since about 1986.    Started out in residential and small scale commercial architecture, but my last projects were all large scale commercial , urban planning, or academic projects.  The last project I designed which was ultimately constructed was the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in Boston.  I was the senior designer under Alfred Wojciechowski, Principal, and Richard Bertman, as Managing Partner, both of CBT Architects.  After I left the project, the design was developed by Margaret Schiff as the senior designer.   After 20 years or so of working for others, in the corporate world of architecture as a senior designer and senior associate at perhaps Boston’s biggest and busiest privately held firm, I had to get away from it to do my own proverbial “thing”.   The reasons are many, but essentially it came down to the fact that I needed to do something else, as I wasn’t practicing architecture professionally the way I had imagined I would back when I was a passionate student in Architecture School.

The first concept sketch I did for what would eventually become The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Boston

For nearly the last ten years or so, architectural illustration had been becoming a major portion of the work I was doing.  I would be responsible not only for designing the building, but also producing the images (rendered plans, elevations, and perspectives) which helped to illustrate the building for (and attempt to endear it to) the public during the approvals process.  Boston’s approval process is famous for its rigor, and I had a great time doing sketch after sketch of scheme after scheme.  But I found myself working until 2 or 3 in the morning, or pulling all-nighters, trying to illustrate a building I had also spent the week designing.  Something had to give.  And it did.

I started my architectural illustration studio in Fall of 2007, and now work mainly in the Boston and New York markets. My work is in both the traditional (watercolor, pencil) and digital mediums. I always strive to deliver the best possible work, often despite short deadlines and tight budgets.  Because I was a practicing project architect and senior designer, my process  is a production-based one, highly flexible, and exceptionally fast.  With architectural illustration it often comes down to “what do you need and when do you need it?”  And if my process allows my client to have their staff continue to work on the building even as I am executing the final renderings, so much the better.  Rarely do I ever receive complete design documents, with a week to linger and produce an unhurried image or two.

I have been honored to work with the best, both as an employee and now as their consultant, and I simply try to make every new piece of work better than the last.

My personal side is given to being a husband to my (1982) junior high prom date, and father to two boys.  I work in a small studio, in a small house, on a small city-lot, in a small 350-year old ‘burb north of Boston with enough lakes and ponds to let me sneak out to go fishing a couple hours a week. I’m a horrible fisherman, but frankly it’s more about getting out than it is about catching anything.

After family, my personal priorities are, well, personal.  They’ll sneak in here at the edges over time.  For now maybe it’s enough to say that I am a collector of rare books and bindings (“Stikeman & Co., NY”, Binders, especially);  that I am a reader (especially Joyce’s “Ulysses”, which I have been intriqued by for about fifteen years now); that I suffer from the architect’s curse of designing and building everything in my house, never really finishing it; that I am a hopelessly amateur cook with high aspirations.  That’s about it for now, no need to bare the soul here in an “about me” paragraph, right?

A typical Stikeman & Co. binding, ca. 1910.

“I’ve got a second chance at life. I’m not going to waste it on a big house and a new car every year and a bunch of friends who want a big house and a new car every year.” – Somerset Maugham, ‘The Razor’s Edge’