Barry Svigals
Architect & Partner Emeritus
Svigals + Partners
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Barry Svigals was a featured speaker at K12 Facilities Forum ’17. Read a summary of his session here.
Artist, architect, writer and public speaker, Barry is the founder of Svigals + Partners, an architecture and art firm, whose mission is to nurture and inspire prosperous, compassionate communities. He believes we are all creative and that capacity needs to find expression in how we live and work together. Awakening creativity, we can participate in bringing to life our communities and more fully contribute to the world we inhabit. It can remind us that our struggles, our joys and sorrows, are shared. They are what bind us as a community.
Perhaps now more than ever, we need to feel again a sense of our collective humanity. Through creative engagement, Barry’s aim is to touch that commonality we all carry in our hearts. This has been his effort as both an artist and architect: to remember, and remind others, that we are born to be creative and we need to bring that creative spirit to our lives, our communities and the world.
Trained as an architect at the Yale School of Architecture, Barry also studied sculpture at the Ecole Nationale Superiere in Paris. Encompassing a wide range of clients, his firm’s architectural designs include projects for Yale University, Boston College and the University of Connecticut, as well as numerous public schools, including most recently, the new elementary school for Sandy Hook. Corporate clients include PepsiCo, Yale New Haven Hospital and the Metroplitan Museum of Art. He has also designed homes for Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau as well as Keith Richards and Patti Hansen.
Over the last 35 years, he has taught and lectured at a number of academic institutions including the Yale School of Architecture, the Harvard School of Business, and Stamford University. His love of sculpture and figurative art led to its integration into the architecture of his firm, bringing back an historical tradition and providing a dimension which could give it deeper meaning. For this contribution to the practice of architecture, he was awarded the Fellowship to the American Institute of Architects.