President's Award for Excellence: David Hacin and Hacin + Associates

The Boston Preservation Alliance is pleased to present our 2022 President’s Award for Excellence to David Hacin and Hacin + Associates.

David J. Hacin, FAIA is the Founding Principal and Creative Director of Hacin + Associates, an interdisciplinary architecture and design firm based in Boston’s South End neighborhood.

Since the studio’s founding in 1993, H+A’s dedicated team of design professionals has built a broad portfolio of residential, commercial, hospitality, and preservation and adaptive reuse projects across Boston and beyond.

The son of an architect and born in Geneva, Switzerland, David has spent his 35+ year career collaborating on projects that strengthen ties to communities and their surrounding contexts while encouraging a collective engagement with clients and, often, entire neighborhoods. He is proud to have served for nearly twenty years as a Mayoral appointee to the Boston Civic Design Commission, the City of Boston’s design review panel for significant projects that impact the public realm. Additionally, David has been an active volunteer on behalf of several communities, professional and non-profit organizations, including the Boston Society of Architects, the Design Industry Groups of Massachusetts, Historic Boston Inc., and the Boston Center for the Arts. An avid supporter of the next generation of design thinking, he has been a member of the Northeastern University School of Architecture Advisory Board and a guest critic and lecturer at design schools across the country, including the Harvard GSD, MIT, the University of Virginia, Kansas State University, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Roger Williams University, and the Boston Architectural College.

David and the team at Hacin + Associates demonstrate a passion for compelling design that resonates with meaning, clarity of intent, and a strong sense of place. Over the past three decades working in a city rich in historic architecture like Boston, H+A has intervened in preservation projects across typologies and community, such as the Whitney Hotel, 83 Gardner Street, FP3, the Jordan Lofts, and Arlington House, to name a few. When engaging in a preservation project, the firm’s architects and designers identify innovative solutions to meet the goals of preservation agencies, satisfy the technical requirements of new and existing buildings, and achieve the programmatic needs of clients, all while ensuring that the context and history of a site remain prominent.

“David has been a consistent voice for preservation, both through his design work and his seat on BCDC,” says Alison Frazee, Executive Director of the Boston Preservation Alliance. “We know that when Hacin + Associates is the architect, we will be welcome at the table to share ideas and that historic character will be front of mind. David and his team excel at contextual designs that embrace neighborhood materials and architectural style while creating a sensitive modern statement in Boston’s historic neighborhoods.”

2022 Preservation Achievement Award Recipients