Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich have led a diverse team at Peterson Rich Office since establishing the firm in 2014.

Miriam Peterson grew up in New York City. The daughter of two architects, she spent parts of her childhood in Italy, where her parents taught about the classical city. Miriam attended the Trinity School in Manhattan, and studied economics at Cornell. Upon graduating she got an internship in the offices of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA), where she spent two years building models before attending the Yale School of Architecture. At Yale Miriam was awarded the Edward Parsons Medal for the student showing exceptional promise in urban design.

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Miriam went back to TWBTA to work on the Barnes Foundation Museum, a project that relocated the idiosyncratic collection of art and industrial objects from an historic mansion in suburban Philadelphia, to a newly built contemporary structure in the city’s downtown.

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Upon completion of the Barnes Foundation building, Miriam started PRO. She led the firm’s first ground up project, an artist’s studio on an historic site in Connecticut. Since then she has led multiple studio and gallery projects, including studio buildings for Nina Chanel Abney and Mickalene Thomas, the Perrotin Gallery Flagship in New York, and the new Great Hall Gallery project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Miriam along with her partner Nathan Rich held the Kaplan Chair in Urban Design with the Regional Plan Association, where they studied scalable design solutions for NYCHA campuses. Miriam also holds an adjunct faculty position at the Yale School of Architecture.

Nathan Rich brings a breadth of experience with global reach. He grew up on the north shore of Boston where his mother was a teacher and his father worked in elder care. After attending Wesleyan University where he studied under the painter Tula Telfair, Nathan was awarded a Henry Luce Scholarship which sent him to Beijing. He taught at the Tsinghua University School of Architecture, and worked alongside historians there to research and document the rapid growth of Asian cities. After returning to the US to get a professional degree in Architecture from Yale he worked in New York and London with SHoP Architects and Woods Bagot before settling for five years at Steven Holl Architects where he was project architect on the new Lewis Center for the Arts building at Princeton University, a project that explored strategies for integrating contemporary architecture in an historic campus.

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His past experiences with urban scale issues, adaptive reuse, and cultural institutions have guided Nathan’s work at PRO. He has led several projects in which contemporary spaces for art and performance are built in historic contexts, including The Pruzan Art Center building at Wesleyan University, and The Shepherd Art Center in Detroit.

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Nathan along with his partner Miriam Peterson held the Kaplan Chair in Urban Design with the Regional Plan Association, where they studied scalable design solutions for NYCHA campuses. Nathan is closely involved in PRO’s ongoing projects with The New York City Housing Authority, especially in community engagement work.