By Robin Washington
Boston Business Journal
Nov. 29, 2018

M. David Lee, FAIA
Title: President, Stull and Lee Inc. Architecture Planning

Age: 75

Education: Bachelor’s degree in architecture. University of Illinois, 1967; Master’s degree in architecture and urban design, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Residence: Brookline

In a way, you could say that the hallmark of David Lee’s career was born in protest.

Not the marches of the Civil Rights Movement, although Lee did grow up in that era and graduated college at its apex in the late 1960s, only to start graduate school in Boston just in time for the court-ordered busing crisis.

Rather, it was the grassroots campaign against a 12-lane highway slated to cut through central Boston that led then-Gov. Francis Sargent to abandon the project in favor of a mass transit corridor, the southern half of today’s Orange Line. With his senior partner Donald Stull, Lee got the nod to design the swath on either side of the tracks and came up with the idea of the linear 4.7-mile, 50-acre Southwest Corridor Park, stretching from Back Bay Station to Forest Hills.

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“It got a presidential design award,” from the National Endowment for the Arts, says Lee. But more important, he says, was buy-in from previously skeptical stakeholders: from St. Botolph Street residents initially concerned about “outsiders” congregating in public space that would evolve into the crown jewel of their neighborhood to a group of elementary school girls Lee once stumbled upon, asking him to take their picture in the park he’d designed — though they didn’t know it.

It’s humbling, he says, “when you see kids and people proud of something you did.”

Head out from that corridor and you’ll see other Stull and Lee edifices dotting the landscape, from the Boston Police Headquarters to the Roxbury Community College campus, Northeastern University’s John D. O’Bryant African American Institute and the South End’s Harriet Tubman House, among many others.

“You could spend a whole day going from meeting to meeting in Boston and stay entirely within Stull and Lee buildings,” says John Cruz of Cruz Construction, a longtime collaborator with the firm.

And if you’re willing to travel across the country and look up, you can see the two companies’ largest joint project: the 30-story Biscayne View tower and associated buildings in Miami.

“That was significant for Stull and Lee,” says Cruz. “It made me feel good as a black person to say that we not only put a significant project together, but that we used a black architect. It’s something that instills a lot of pride in the black community in Miami.”

Lee’s hometown is Chicago, where he grew up solidly middle class in a family that valued education. “I’m one of the few people, black or white, who can say my grandfather met my grandmother at a college course taught by her father,” he says. Yet they still experienced “institutional and routine racism and discrimination” in one of the most segregated cities in the North.

A local Chicago builder’s how-to TV spots that resembled the later WGBH show “This Old House” sparked Lee’s interest in architecture. The University of Illinois followed, then Harvard.

“It was actually a hip city,” he says of then-Boston, with its jazz clubs particularly attracting him. “You could get a contact high just walking into a venue! People seemed to get along pretty well, save for when the busing crisis hit.”

What kept him in town was the proximity to Vermont’s ski slopes and an introduction to Stull, already viewed as a pioneering architect. Lee joined the firm and eventually became Stull’s partner and later president. Stull retired in 2014.

The firm, with 10 architects after scaling down from 60 before the Great Recession of 2008, posts yearly revenue of $1 million.

“(Meeting Stull) changed my life. He was committed to things I wanted to do,” Lee says, calling his partner “a tough old bird” and their collaboration like “a husband and wife. You’re going to have (disagreements.)”

Yet Stull was a powerful mentor, as were architects David Crane and Max Bond, the latter whom Lee calls the “dean of all African-American architects.”

Then there’s Lee’s actual spouse, foundation executive Celeste Reid Lee.

“We were at a performance of ‘Phantom’ a number of years ago,” he says, describing their seating next to several fellow board members on the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. “When we got to the midway point, the banker was thinking about how the play was financed. The insurance guy was thinking about the chandelier falling. I’m looking at stage set. And my wife was in tears over the plot.”

So in his own life story, for all the accolades — fellow of the American Institute of Architects, faculty positions at Harvard and MIT, structures likely to last centuries — was there ever a job Lee regretted taking?“Yes,” he answers, without missing a beat. “There was one I wish I rejected because of the budget. It was the —

“Ah, I don’t want to go there,” he interjects himself prudently.

Which, along with talent, is how you stay in business 50 years.

M. David Lee’s timeline:
1943: Born, Chicago, Illinois
1967: Graduates University of Illinois with Bachelors in Architecture
1971: Received Masters from Harvard in both Architecture and Urban Design; begins full-time work with Stull
1990: Southwest Corridor Park officially opens
1992: Named Fellow, American Institute of Architects