Higher Achievement
- Adam Smith
- 2 hours ago
- 8 min read
Sampan talks with ‘Pip’ Lewis, the architect behind the award-winning Josiah Quincy Upper School
At one time, the new Josiah Quincy Upper School building that exists today in Chinatown seemed like an impossibility.
In fact, for years high school students in the neighborhood were stuck in an old school building that was in dire need of repairs. Millions in funding earmarked for renovations had gone for years untouched. Community members were getting desperate and promises were broken as deadlines passed. Entire classes at the Quincy Upper School — then at the Lincoln School building — graduated and left with no hope of repairs or renovations. The idea of bright, modern new building, especially one that would be sustainable and highly energy efficient, seemed like a fantasy.
“We had looked at something like 40 different sites over the years,” recalled Philip “Pip” Lewis, an architect and principal of HMFH Architects, who worked on the Josiah Quincy Upper School project. “There were so many obstacles that we had to jump over to get it to work out.”
Lewis — who got involved in the school about 15 years ago — has been quoted as saying the wait the mostly minority students had to endure for a new school was an “injustice.”
But sometimes constraints can lead to creativity, and in the case of the Josiah Quincy Upper School, great rewards. After completing the 178,000-square-foot school in time for the 2024-2025 school year, it ended up surpassing even Lewis’ own goals — though he and others involved including the school administration, environmental experts and city officials, had to give up on some plans, like putting solar panels on the rooftop to generate electricity. The $223.6 million project was recently recognized for its environmentally friendly design. It was named “Green Building of the Year” and awarded the People's Choice Award at the 2025 Green Building Showcase, hosted by Built Environment Plus, in early December. The building is also one of only two Massachusetts School Building Authority-funded schools in the state — and one of eight schools nationwide — to be certified as LEED Platinum. That’s the highest certification level in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.
The school boasts a rooftop outdoor classroom area with native plants, a media center, sports and fitness areas, a black box theater, full basketball court, and a “fresh air” and filtration system to block outside pollution from street and highway traffic.
Sampan caught up with Lewis to talk about his role in the project, his views on design and how he – during his own time in high school in Detroit – aspired to become an architect and earn his master’s degree at MIT in 1981. The following exchange has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Sampan: When you look at the building where it is now, you have the highway right there, and hospitals surrounding it, and the density of existing buildings in that spot. It’s on less than an acre, and it really looks like an impossible project. What were some of the obstacles that you identified from the outset?
Lewis: The biggest obstacle at the outset, was finding a site. Because, really, so much of what took so long was trying to get everybody to agree on what the site would be. At that time, a portion of the current site was owned by the Boston Chinese Evangelical Church. … So that site, it was on the list, but it wasn't the recommended site originally, because it was such a small site. Eventually we came back to that one as being the best one.
Sampan: … It looks like there was not a lot of room to work with …
Lewis: It's a very tiny site to build a whole high school. It’s unheard of, which is why we knew it had to go vertical. So the challenge was, once you have such a tight site, you know you're going to have to build a multi-story building. And then you have the issue of how do you get students easily up and down several floors? You also have the question of, can we get all of the functions that we need in a fully functional school? And in the end, you know, a full-size gymnasium doesn't fit on the site, which is why it hangs over the sidewalk about 15 feet. And then we knew also that that meant there was no way we were going to have an outdoor play field, like a normal school might have. So we started pushing for getting the open space up on the roof of the building. It isn't a play field, but it's an outdoor space. … There are wonderful plants up there and things like that – student gardens and paths to walk on, and some contact with the fresh air….
Sampan: ... Did some of the constraints, like having to build a rooftop outdoor area — make you think a little more creatively to accomplish some of these environmental and sustainability goals? How did the puzzle pieces fit together?
Lewis: ...The site (size and location) certainly helped us along, because we would not have done the outdoor space on the rooftop if we had an option of doing something else. The site has no parking, too, so it really encourages the staff, and the students also to use public transportation and to walk to school. … As you know, Chinatown is very rich urban environment. So it's nice to have a school that's right in the middle of it, and that actually contributed to some of the sustainability things that we were going after.
Sampan: What does it mean for both you personally and for the city that the school has been named Green Building of the Year and got this recognition?
Lewis: It's very cool. Particularly on this project, which was such a long slog for us to get it done. It's nice at the end to be sort of recognized for the good, sustainable building that it is. And so it makes all the struggle more than worth it. … After so many years, oh my goodness, it was a success. We pushed for certain things. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and pushing and pulling to try to get the whole facility to fit there, and to get the OK from the city to build it — like to build a full-size gym, even though it had to hang out over the sidewalk.
...We were really, particularly toward the end, pushing to try to get every point that we could — like site utilization, air quality, energy usage, reuse of materials. … We had a lot of items on the on the list that were called “maybes” – we thought we could get them, but we weren’t sure we could get them. And we did a real push to change the “maybes” to “probably yeses” and then to “definitely yeses” to get to where we wanted to go.
Sampan: Looking back now, what parts of the building do you feel most proud of?
Lewis: I would say one of them would be the open space on the roof. It's really large, and it wasn't something that the City of Boston was doing at that point. So to convince people that this made sense ... was an incredible achievement. Another was the full-size gymnasium where you could have bleachers and a space for a real high school-competition basketball game. We had to really lobby for that. There are so many schools that don't have that and we really had to push for that. (They are) able to play real legitimate basketball and have a home court. That's really important for the spirit of any school to have a home court right where they can come together and cheer their team….
Sampan: What does it mean for you, personally, at this stage in your career to accomplish the Quincy Upper School and have it come out the way it did?
Lewis: It is very rewarding. HMFH does more schools than anything else. You know, we do some housing and things like that. But really the firm was established more than 50 years ago by an educational planner for the purpose of designing schools. And I think designing schools is a wonderful thing to do. It has real societal value. And you always get this fantastic feeling when you're coming into a new project and you're walking through the school that you're going to either renovate or replace. Some of the schools are in such horrible shape and have such poor equipment, such poor facilities, that it's kind of – it can be kind of depressing. And certainly the Quincy Upper School was like that. The old Lincoln School hadn't really had a large renovation since it was built in 1913.
But it was so great watching the students come into the new school for the first time and understanding all the resources they have at their hands and how it just really uplifts them and opens up their minds. They see all sorts of possibilities. They're in this amazing new space that they never dreamed of.
Sampan: How did you get involved in architecture?
Lewis: I got interested at a very young age. I was growing up in Detroit — that was, you know, back in the 1960s and 1970s, and Detroit was not in good shape back then. As a kid, and then high school student, I kept thinking of ways in which I thought the city could be helped through architecture and buildings… It was pretty naive, but it sort of got me started in thinking about architecture, and my trips to Chicago that my parents took us on, and Toronto, and my visit to Expo ’67 all the incredible architecture was there from all over the world – that really got me inspired to be an architect. And then I went to a fantastic High School in Detroit called Cass Technical High School that had an architectural program. I was head over heels with architecture.
Sampan: Do you have a favorite architect who’s inspired you?
Lewis: Somebody asked me that at work recently, and suddenly I realized how old I was. I really admired the work of Frank Gehry, who recently passed away. He's done a lot of marvelous buildings in his long lifetime. Also Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who has an important series of buildings in Detroit, so I was familiar with them. He was a star who made so many incredible, beautiful buildings. They were a startling new vision of clean, simple, less-is-more design when he was doing them in the 1960s and the 1950s. And then, of course, there's Frank Lloyd Wright. His work is so emotional and so wonderful. I think anybody can understand and appreciate that.
Sampan: High school was the place where you personally got your opportunity to go into architecture. What would you say to anybody who is a teenager now in the Quincy Upper School and thinks that they might want to follow the same path and become an architect? Do you have any advice you'd give them?
Lewis: Well, just to get involved early on. And I have had this conversation with Quincy Upper students who were considering careers in architecture and engineering and things like that. You can get to see if you like it. There are opportunities to become interns in architectural firms, even if you're going to high school, and then as you're getting into into college. That's what I was doing. I was going out in the summer and getting summer jobs at the architectural firms around. Another piece of advice I always say, is that it's hard work and you have to have a lot of patience and stick to it. It's a lot of years of school, and it can be a lot of late nights and things like that. … But it can be a really worth the effort. It can be really satisfying career.
