Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles

Kallmann McKinnell & Wood is an architectural design firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1962 as Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles by Gerhard Kallmann (1915-2012), Michael McKinnell (1935–present), and Edward Knowles.

The firm originated when it won an international competition to design the Boston City Hall in 1962. Soon reconstituted as Kallmann McKinnell and Wood, ("Kallmann, the eldest member of the team, [is] German born and English educated. ... McKinnell [is] English born and educated. ... Both have served as ... educators at the Harvard Graduate School of Design." Henry A. Wood "joined the firm in 1965.") the firm would go on to design structures across the United States and abroad.

While the firm's "early period" consisted of bold structures of poured and pre-cast concrete, its later innovative work more often utilized brick, stone, copper, slate and cast stone, among other materials, for buildings that were less Brutalist in style and more postmodernist. In particular, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established KMW's new direction with a copper-roofed villa set amidst a stand of woods. The course of the firm's work through the late 1980s was charted in Alex Krieger's exhibition at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and published in the catalog that he edited, The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood. In 2004, David Dillon's tome of the same title carried the office's work through the early 21st century.

KMW buildings have won the Harleston Parker Medal, given out for the best new building in Greater Boston, more times than any other firm in the history of the medal, as documented in the major exhibit of KMW's original drawings for Boston City Hall, from 2008. Drawn from the KMW archive in the collection of Historic New England, this exhibition was presented at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and organized by architect Gary Wolf.

The firm's design for Boston City Hall was selected after a two-stage national design competition with 256 entrants. The jury composed of major architects and three prominent Boston businessmen unanimously chose the project because of its logical and successful handling of the competition's complex building program, because of its inventive response to the urban site, and because of its powerful symbolism of a "New Boston." Boston historian Walter Muir Whitehill proclaimed the KMK design to be "as fine a building for its time and place as Boston has ever produced." Horizon Magazine lauded both the design and the competition process itself: "Boston's jury...has turned in a decisive verdict that will stand for some time as a model of responsible civic conduct."

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