About

Stephen E. Tise, Principal of TDA, is an award winning architect recognized for master planning and housing design across a broad socio-economic spectrum, synthesizing disparate principles into cohesive, humanistic resident oriented strategies. 

Steve started his career in affordable housing planning and design working with Don Stull in 1968. In 1976 he started his own firm working predominantly with non-profit sponsors, expanding to include public housing design work with local housing authorities in the Boston metropolitan region. In the early 1980's, the young firm won the Boston Housing Authority's competition to redevelop Fidelis Way, a seriously troubled 640 unit development in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. Steve’s work on this project established new concepts for revitalizing distressed inner city low income developments through careful planning strategies, controlled intervention and resident participation. 

His talent for architectural form and detail bridges an obvious gap in project types. His work in affordable housing became widely recognized for its refinement and attention to detail. Steve has always felt that clients with limited housing choices are entitled to the same standard of care as those with unlimited choices. The mindset of designers and developers working these two socio-economic constituencies was the subject of his study as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard in 1978 and has heavily influenced his career.

Today the work of TDA follows Steve's award winning approach synthesizing the individual principles of defensible space, New Urbanism and programmed public/private realm open space into humanistic resident oriented redevelopment strategies that integrate critical social service concepts into physical planning and design.