His was a prominent Boston family whose roots went back to Nantucket and New Bedford whaling and shipping interests in the 18th century.

In 1880, he became partner of Rotch & Tilden (Boston) with George Thomas Tilden, designing churches, the Memorial Library in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, gymnasiums of Bowdoin College and Phillips Exeter Academy, various buildings of Milton Academy, the art schools and art museum of Wellesley College, and many private houses and business blocks throughout the United States.

[2] Rotch was chairman of the visiting committee of Fine Arts of Harvard University, a member of the Corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The scholarship sends an American student of architecture for a minimum of eight months study and travel abroad.

Benjamin Rotch, a relatively well-known landscape artist, had studied painting in Paris in 1847,[7] and appreciated the "value of foreign travel in stimulating young architects' imagination through contact with great buildings of the past.