Our Commitment to Education and a Culture of Learning

At Goody Clancy, we have made a deep commitment to focus all our resources and energies on serving our clients in education. We’re inspired by the power of education to elevate communities, unlock discovery, and support more healthy and equitable lives for everyone.

Creating places for education has always been a core part of our practice since our first project at MIT in 1962, the modest and since demolished West Garage. Since then, we have completed more than 300 projects on campuses across that nation. We have learned so much about what makes great education environments at every scale—campus, building, classroom, dorm room—and have codified and shared these insights within our firm and with our clients so that each new piece of work builds on the foundation of what we know while integrating future-facing innovations and paradigms.

For many years, we have complemented our education practice with other planning and design work that similarly embodies social purpose—affordable housing, urban planning, and civic architecture. We are proud of this legacy of work outside of the education sphere and its positive impact on our communities, but today we believe our greatest contribution can come from a singular focus of education. Today we embrace a future as an education design firm.

Our journey toward a singular focus on education began before the Covid-19 pandemic. It developed through a strategic planning process that engaged everyone in our employee-owned firm. As we worked with our clients through the most intense periods of the pandemic, we saw firsthand both disruption and accelerated innovation. The pandemic highlighted the critical role of in-person learning and immersive learning communities; both are foundational to student success and innovative research. But it also accelerated the adoption of digital technologies and innovations as enhancements to learning.

Today, we can harvest what we have learned to create new places for discovery that blend what we have always known and what we have continue to learn.  This is the newest challenge that inspires our work.