Ahearn’s early career included teaching at Boston Architectural College and designing for the Architects Collaborative and Benjamin Thompson & Associates. At the latter, he had the good fortune to work on the adaptive reuse of Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

Reinventing empty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commercial buildings and turning the spaces between them into public outdoor places, he helped create the first so-called festival marketplace in the country. To do so, he and his colleagues developed a script that imagined how visitors could experience the reborn district.

The success of this approach at Faneuil Hall proved to Ahearn the ability of narrative-driven architecture to build community. By weaving a storyline, he crafted an environment that was more inviting, engaging and authentic than it otherwise might have been.