James Dyer, 36

James Dyer grew up in the Boston suburb of Newton as the son of two architects, and he can’t really remember a time when he wasn’t going to enter the field. 

Which is exactly what he did after studying architecture at the University of Tennessee. He started at Boston-based Elkus Manfredi Architects about a week after graduation. 

Dyer worked initially on a range of competitions and proposals, which often garnered more experience than anything else. For instance, he was for two and a half years part of a team designing facilities for the Boston-area proposal for the 2024 Summer Olympics (which L.A. would ultimately win). He has also worked on projects across asset classes, including hotels, offices and master-planned communities. 

That has included over the past year-plus a more than 400-key hotel adjacent to the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. The design of the $290 million project involves blending it with both the convention center and the surrounding streetscape, and rendering it functional for many purposes — not least hosting a whole lot of people at once. Dyer has also assumed a leading role in Lyrik Back Bay, a 450,000-square-foot, mixed-use, air rights-heavy project over several lanes of the Massachusetts Turnpike, plus subway lines, in Boston. You can imagine the technical prowess required. 

Finally, Dyer has carved a niche in designing student housing, itself a fast-growing niche in commercial real estate. That includes current projects at Northeastern University and the University of Virginia. Such work is often different than in other asset classes, where a single client or project manager is the point of contact. 

“Student housing is, due to the fact that, whichever college or university you’re working for, it’s such a multilayered organization,” Dyer said.

Not that he minds. The Boston-based project architect on the cusp of his 37th birthday likes things busy and challenging: “I get a little nervous when things start to get quiet.”