The work of architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien has a double nature: stature and modesty. So, too, do Williams and Tsien have a double nature: Williams was trained as an architect, in the office of Richard Meier, while Tsien has a background in fine arts. That they are able to conjoin these disparate impulses in their work and in their collaborative partnership is a key to their quietly impressive architecture, which creates excitement not through bombast or manifestos but through understated Modernist elegance. One of their earliest commissions, Princeton University's Feinberg Hall, was singled out for acclaim by the AIA as well as Time magazine. The architects repeated the double honor in a Pool House that featured a 70-foot painting by Sol LeWitt. Their renovation and expansion of the Phoenix Art Museum in 1996 won an honor award from the Arizona AIA, while the Neurosciences Institute was termed a "magnificent piece of work" by The New York Times and received multiple awards.

Other projects by Williams and Tsien include the new Museum of American Folk Art adjoining New York's Museum of Modern Art, as well as a multiphase athletic complex for Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

In keeping with their multidisciplinary interests, Williams and Tsien have designed traveling shows for the Noguchi Foundation and produced "Domestic Arrangements," a traveling exhibition for the Walker Art Center that sought to explore early Modernism's relevance in a contemporary context.