Practice
The first, largest, and longest-running project is the design of our practice.
Iwan Baan
Principal Leadership Group
MASS is stewarded by our three Co-Executive Directors: Alan Ricks, Christian Benimana, and Patricia Gruits.
MASS is a global team of architects, landscape architects, storytellers, engineers, and activists.
Our collective blend of lived experiences and interdisciplinary expertise fuels our curiosity and pursuit of impact.
→ Meet our Team
We bring diverse and interdisciplinary expertise to ensure the projects and communities with the most to gain have access to the highest quality services.
We have offices in Kigali, Boston, Poughkeepsie and Santa Fe.
→ Learn about our Services
Board of Directors
Our leadership team and our Board of Directors hold us accountable to our mission and those of our partners, allowing us to work beyond the constraints of the “typical process” to challenge entrenched social and structural inequities.
Alan Ricks
Close Committment
We provide support at every stage—from the earliest kernel of an idea, and by staying involved beyond opening day. Sean Hemmerle
We work on over 50 projects each year to prove what is possible and bring impact to scale.
In 2017, we were bestowed the National Design Award for Architecture by the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Museum for Design, and in 2022, the American Institute of Architects named us Firm of the Year. These acknowledgments, like others we’ve been privileged to receive, reflect an evolving discourse bigger than MASS.
→ Check out our News + Awards
Our story
MASS began not with a vision statement or a business plan, but with a group of students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) who shared a conviction that architecture could matter more, in the lives of the people who used it, and in the world at large. What began as a loose band of allies in those formative years became something much more than any of us had hoped or imagined at the outset.
In 2006, one of our co-founders, Michael Murphy, took a break from his work as a student at the GSD to hear Dr. Paul Farmer speak, and that led to a summer volunteering with Partners In Health. The conversation they began opened the door to working in Rwanda and eventually the invitation to design the Butaro District Hospital, which would become MASS’s first project.
Michael rallied a group of classmates to see what, if anything, students might do to support PIH and the people of Butaro and the broader Burera district. That circle included MASS's co-founders, Michael Murphy, Marika Shioiri-Clark, Ryan Leidner, Alda Ly, Alan Ricks, and David Saladik, along with Yoshiki Waterhouse, Justin Brown, and volunteers Maura Rockcastle and Sierra Bainbridge, alongside many others who supported the effort.
What we found on those hillsides changed us.
The doctors and public health workers at Partners In Health modeled a form of engagement they called accompaniment: the commitment to walk alongside communities rather than arrive with answers already in hand. We learned that listening is as much a design skill as drawing, and that the birth worker, the mason, and the public health researcher are not inputs to a creative process; rather they are co-authors of it.
The work on the ground grew as Michael took a year from school to move to Rwanda in 2008 and others came for shorter stints. In 2009, Cody Birkey, Garrett Gantner, and Ebbe Strathairn arrived, along with Sierra Bainbridge, who had been volunteering since 2008 with Maura Rockcastle and now moved to Rwanda to lead the team and oversee Butaro to completion. She also joined the fledgling faculty at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) alongside Garret, which had begun the first architecture program in the country, and she would later become chair of the architecture department. In Kigali she worked alongside Commode Dushimimana and Christian Benimana, both teaching assistants at KIST, who supported our earliest projects, including the Butaro District Hospital and the Umubano School.
Opening of University of Global Health Equity. (From left to right) Sarah Kitchin, Michael Murphy, Jean Paul Uzabakiriho, Dr. Paul Farmer, Sierra Bainbridge, Kelly Alvarez Doran, Alan Ricks, Rene M. Gasana, Christian Benimana
In 2010, we incorporated as a nonprofit and opened our Boston office, with Alan Ricks and Dave Saladik now working full-time, joined by Monique Guimond and Amie Shao. Others joined in different ways. Karen Conway came first as a volunteer in Boston, supporting design and helping expand our work to Haiti, and over time became a long-term board member, one of the many people whose relationship with MASS has only deepened.
In October 2012, we became independent of PIH's fiscal sponsorship and launched as a fully independent organization, with offices in Boston, Kigali, and Port-au-Prince. The mission was summed up in the name: Model of Architecture Serving Society, better known as MASS.
By then we had three completed projects: Butaro District Hospital, which opened in January 2011; Umubano School; and the first phase of Doctors' Housing at Butaro. But what we had built together was something larger than any single project. It was a way of working and the beginning of what we often describe as our first, largest, and longest-running project: the design of our practice.
And when we say together, we mean it in the fullest sense. It is not only the people who made the drawings, but also the teachers, advocates, allies, and partners who encouraged, mentored, challenged, and supported us along the way. The masons in Rwanda who developed the methods to carve and construct the volcanic stone facades. The clinicians who shared years of knowledge about how disease moves through space. The donors who believed in an idea before there was proof. The community members in rural Rwanda who shared with us what we should aspire toward.
It is this community that has contributed so significantly to making a Model of Architecture Serving Society.
Some participated briefly, others invested years, and many remain nearly two decades on, continuing to build our legacy together. All have been part of making what we are now.
MASS Principals (2025)
In the ensuing years MASS has expanded in many ways. It works throughout North America in addition to Africa, with offices in Boston, Santa Fe, and Poughkeepsie, NY, in addition to Kigali. Increasingly the work is concentrated in “labs” that focus on important needs and where MASS seeks to have influence beyond specific projects: Maternal and Newborn Health, Sustainable Native Communities, Public Memory and Memorials, Housing, Abundant Futures, Fringe Cities, Deaf Space and Disability Justice, and the Africa Design Centre.
In 2022, Michael Murphy stepped down as President and Executive Director to teach, write, and start his own practice. The organization is now led by three Co-Executive Directors, Alan Ricks, Patricia Gruits, and Christian Benimana, and 19 principals, many of whom have been with MASS since the earliest years.
Over a thousand collaborators have come through MASS's doors, many leaving an indelible mark on the organization, in our work, and in our world, whether they were here for a brief internship or decades of collaboration.
Today, our team carries this work forward across dozens of projects in over twenty countries, still guided by the conviction that beauty is not a luxury, and that architecture's highest purpose is to serve society.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, AL
Iwan Baan
“Greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century”
- The Dallas Morning News, on the National Memorial for Peace and Justice