Best of Boston

When David Hacin opened his firm in the South End in 1993, the neighborhood was full of old warehouses and vacant parking lots. Once developers discovered the neighborhood, they tapped Hacin to design Laconia Lofts — the artists’ building that sparked the area’s transformation to its present incarnation as Boston’s art and design hub. The new spaces Hacin and his team design are sleek and innovative, yet the veteran architect is also a passionate preservationist; in fact, some of the interdisciplinary firm’s most compelling designsare its renovations of existing buildings in which old and new elements exist in cohesion.