Bill Rawn

Bill Rawn talks down to you as an equal. Almost 6 feet 8, he glides through a room like an elegant giraffe. You learn when you engage him that he is a listener, not a talker. He absorbs far more than he emits.

It is this listening skill, along with great talent, that has helped make him a stunning success as an architect.

“Listening is a problem for architects,’’ Rawn says. “In architecture school, we do our own projects. There is no client, no budget. You’re doing it all by yourself. You find your own voice, which is good, but you don’t learn to listen to other people.’’

Unlike architects with defiant signature styles, he does not design Statements.

“He is modern and contemporary, but not Frank Gehry off-the-wall,’’ says Winthrop Wassenar, former director of facilities at Williams College and project manager for Rawn’s ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance which opened in Williamstown in 2005.

Rawn is all listener when he starts a project. He and his associates will spend three days at the site before the design process begins. The firm will set up shop on campus and conduct interviews with students, faculty, administrators. There will be open studio sessions allowing clients of all stripes to follow and comment on the models and sketches. Rawn will repeat this process five or six times.

Last month, Architect magazine named William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc., the top architectural firm in the country. While all such lists should be treated with skepticism, it’s nicer to be at the top of one than not.

And while the honor is bound to bring him more business, there were no paper streamers on the floor of the sunlit offices above Post Office Square to mark the occasion. Rawn simply maintained his cruising speed - calm, focused, intense - that sets the tone at the 32-person operation.

But then at 66, William R. Rawn III is no secret. He gave us Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, the soon-to-open W Hotel in Boston’s theater district. His firm has won 81 American Institute of Architecture awards, including nine national honors, since he opened for business in 1983.

He began as a solo act in a tiny office above Tremont Street, much like Philip Marlowe behind a frosted glass door, and since then has completed 138 projects. Fame first came to him in the mid-’80s as the architect-hero in Tracy Kidder’s nonfiction bestseller “House.’’ Kidder provided a blow-by-blow account of how Rawn designed a Greek Revival house for friends near Amherst and then oversaw its construction.

“Bill is pretty amazing,’’ says Kidder. “Architects and builders have a long history of contentiousness, but Bill got along fine.’’