Mark is a licensed architect with 25 years professional experience, which includes design (concept through execution), campus planning, project management, and international practice. His specialties include campus planning and design, encompassing cultural institutions, higher education, healthcare, medical education, and scientific research; space programming; master planning.
In 2019, Mark founded Mark Careaga Architecture LLC in Cambridge MA, which is currently completing projects for clients in Boston, New York, Kampala, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. During his 20-year tenure at Payette, 2019 recipient of the AIA Architecture Firm Award, Mark provided leadership for a broad range of projects, spanning medical education, health science research, campus planning, and healthcare. In particular, Mark was central to developing the master plan for the award-winning Aga Khan University Faculty of Arts and Sciences campus in Karachi, Pakistan.
Mark has particular interest in the role that design plays in reflecting, reinforcing and reinterpreting programmatic ambitions, the bridge between intention and inhabitation. Design transforms mere building – shelter and accommodation of functions – into architecture: a vessel for patterns of activity, a framework for human experience and endeavor, a connection to broader historical and cultural contexts.
Mark received his A.B. in mathematics with honors from Occidental College, and his M.Arch. from Harvard. He is the founding chair of the Boston Society of Architects' Global Practice Network, and he served on the Editorial Board of ArchitectureBoston, the BSA's magazine of ideas about design and society. He is currently serving on the AIA's Global Practice Committee, which he chaired in 2022.