Interview by Pavlos Amperiadis
James Timberlake and Stephen Kieran, partners and founders of the architectural practice KieranTimberlake in Philadelphia have an all-in-all debate on Global Design News about architecture, passion, sustainability, collective work, and design excellence, after their recent success in 2022 American Architecture Awards.
Stephen Kieran ‘s work is the result of a thorough examination of the craft of architecture at all scales. From early adoption of building information modeling and environmental analysis tools to close collaboration with fabricators and engagement with materials scientists, Steve shifts expectations of the role of architect. Examples include Loblolly House, an off-site fabricated home in the Chesapeake Bay; SmartWrap™, a mass-customizable building envelope exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; Cellophane House™, a fully recyclable, energy-gathering dwelling exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Embassy of the United States in London, which employs strategies to significantly reduce energy consumption and sets an agenda to achieve carbon neutrality. More recent projects include a renovation and addition to arts and music facilities at Wellesley College, House Renewal projects at Harvard University, a new School of Engineering at Brown University, and three new student life buildings on the University of Washington’s North Campus. Under his guidance, the firm has received over 200 design citations, including the AIA Firm Award in 2008 and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2010. Steve and Partner James Timberlake were the inaugural recipients of the Benjamin Latrobe Fellowship for architectural design research from the AIA College of Fellows in 2001. Since 2002, they have co-authored seven books on architecture, including the influential book refabricating Architecture and their newest monograph, KieranTimberlake: Fullness. Steve lectures internationally to academic and industry audiences and to the broader public, with talks in London, Montreal, Puerto Rico, Rome, and Tel Aviv. He has served on several award juries, including the AIA College of Fellows Latrobe Prize Jury.
James Timberlake’s work reflects his belief in beautifully crafted, thoughtfully made buildings holistically integrated to site, program, and people. James breaks new ground with projects that explore some of today’s most important topics—among them, efficient construction methods, resource conservation strategies, and novel use of building materials. Examples include Melvin J. and Claire Levine Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, which employs the first actively ventilated curtainwall of its type in North America; SmartWrap™, a mass-customizable building envelope exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; Cellophane House™, a fully recyclable, energy-gathering dwelling exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Embassy of the United States in London, which employs strategies to significantly reduce energy consumption and sets an agenda to achieve carbon neutrality. More recent projects include the new US Embassy in London; an Integrated Campus Plan at Rice University; a highly sophisticated laboratory facility for the Institute for Energy Efficiency at University of California Santa Barbara; and a private residence in Mendocino County, California. Under his guidance, the firm has received over 200 design citations, including the AIA Firm Award in 2008 and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2010. James and 12Partner Stephen Kieran were the inaugural recipients of the Benjamin Latrobe Fellowship for architectural design research from the AIA College of Fellows in 2001. Since 2002, they have co-authored seven books on architecture, including the influential book refabricating Architecture and their newest monograph, KieranTimberlake: Fullness. James lectures internationally to academic and industry audiences and to the broader public, with talks in Singapore, London, Cambridge, Melbourne, New Delhi, and Mumbai. He has served on design award juries in New Zealand, Australia, and Barcelona.
Embrace, engage, and endure – have a passion for what you believe and what you produce
GDN: KieranTimberlake is a renowned architectural practice worldwide. The beginning of everything has been the collaboration between you, starting in 1984. What is your recipe for success?
James: Having passion for the profession and work; having a strategic plan, goals, and vision; and having respect for the profession, your partner(s), staff, consultants, and clients. None, along with success, can exist without either passion or respect.
Stephen: Clarity of vision and commitment to principles are our foundation. We share an ethic that forges beautiful architecture through deep, research-based understanding of place, environment, people, building types, construction systems, materials, and performance. We believe form is most resonant when it arises from underlying substance.
Over 40 years of practice have seen the move from analog toolsets and timelines to fully digital, multidimensional visualizations, applications, and tools
GDN: Is working together and sharing a vision a method of choice for architects?
Stephen: All architecture requires teams of owners, architects, engineers, specialty consultants, builders, and material suppliers to work in unison. Without a shared vision and goal set, as well as a carefully designed and implemented process of engagement, architecture will never be great.
James: Working together is a necessity. As is having a vision which can help set direction. Teams must work together, collaboratively, collectively. ‘Collective intelligence’ displaces ‘singular intelligence’ in defining, developing, and executing the complexity of architecture, from inception to completion. However, vision, can come singularly, or collectively. Often lost in the conversation about working together is the need for 1) editing and the ability to edit, and 2) an editor during the discourse about a project, a vision, or the trajectory of a design outcome. Working together cannot simply be an outcome of ‘groupthink’ and believing that all aspects of the conversation or solutions suggested have equal validity, application, or deployment.
GDN: Would you consider collective intelligence and creativity or singular inspiration to be more important in the practice?
James: We believe collective intelligence to be superior to singular intelligence or inspiration. However, that does not preclude the importance of an informed singular inspiration, vision, moonshot, or moments of sheer design brilliance.
Stephen: Both singular instinct and collective intelligence are necessary in equal measure. Without instinct, the search for form is rudderless, without substance and structure. Without collective intelligence, the search for form lacks breadth and depth.
We share an ethic that forges beautiful architecture through deep, research-based understanding of place, environment, people, building types, construction systems, materials, and performance
2022 American Architecture Award winner by the Chicago Athenaeum
GDN: Speaking of collective thinking, what is your approach to the green turn and sustainability discourses in architecture and construction?
Stephen: Sustainable design has been a defining commitment from the outset. It propels transdisciplinary thought in our architecture and discourse across the construction industry. It is central to forging an architecture that becomes a holistic conception of people, place, purpose, systems, and materials.
James: The advancement of environmental ethics, and sustainable practices in the architecture and engineering professions, have benefited from collective intelligence. What we were able to do ‘on our own’ in the early 1990’s to achieve sustainable outcomes compared to the 2020’s is a marked shift in breadth, depth, detail, and execution.
Without a shared vision and goal set, as well as a carefully designed and implemented process of engagement, architecture will never be great
GDN: Given that you both are head architects and authorities in the architectural practice for almost forty years now, how has the practice changed through the years?
James: We were trained on and began with drafting tools, vellum and mylar, pencils and pens, sliderules, and trace paper. Over 40 years of practice have seen the move from analog toolsets and timelines to fully digital, multidimensional visualizations, applications, and tools. Arguably, and this is for the historians to unpack, the last 40-50 years have seen the greatest amount of change to and within the profession, and with its outcomes, of any comparable period since prior to the Renaissance.
Stephen: Our practice has been at the center of the transition from hand drawing to an entirely digitized form of architectural representation. All this has occurred in the past twenty years. Nearly every aspect of practice is altered, from how we think, see and make architecture to the cost of digital hardware, software, training and development.
Become a careful observer of the world about you and all the architecture in it
2022 American Architecture Award winner by the Chicago Athenaeum
GDN: How different an approach is necessary when it comes to designing a building from scratch compared to renovating and creating on another architect’s initial design?
Stephen: We work readily back and forth between renovation and new construction. We see renewal as simply a broader conception of place. Our renovations and additions are conceived as a conversation of respect and change across time. Enabling a useful future for the past requires an artful balancing of old and new form—continuity and change in equal measure.
James: A critical part of our practice since the inception of the firm, working within a structure designed by another architect/firm, utilizes the fullest appreciation of an architect’s training. Working with an existing building means having an appreciation for the merits of the prior architect’s vision, and purpose of the building, while meeting the desires of a new program, and impacts upon the project. One must appreciate simultaneous histories – that which preceded our time; that which embraces our time; and one which anticipates a new future. Many questions arise: What do you embrace? What do you remove? If something is removed, is the meaning destroyed? How does what you add, or replace, change the meaning? These questions are among the fundamental differences between designing fully anew, or within and about an existing structure.
2022 American Architecture Award winner by the Chicago Athenaeum
GDN: You both have written and published many books on architecture. Is theory, research, and concept a pillar that architects should be consistent with?
James: We have seen, with the advent of change in architecture over the past 40-50 years, a simultaneous reduction in appreciation of architectural history, and theory, replaced by a rise in research related to extending designs, incorporating materiality, and embracing sustainability. Change in teaching, professional requirements, and academic priorities have all led to the reservation of even discussing the application of history and theory within projects. Much of this is reserved, at this point in time, to critics and academicians. Philip Johnson once stated, ‘you cannot not know history.’ The decline in the direct application of history and theory during the past 25 years has sadly led to a superficiality in architecture, with a wide focus on form and surface, and less about the fullness of meaning within a holistically integrated project. We would welcome a return to that discourse, which we have continued in our practice and writings, more broadly across the profession.
Stephen: We believe that writing is an important act of self-reflection and projection. We look inward through the act of writing to reflect, to critically understand and to situate the architecture we are making. We then publish our reflections to project them into the broader, highly public discourse on architecture, planning, the environment and research.
Take it apart and put it back together again, preferably in ways that include drawing by hand as the eye to hand to mind connection is unforgettable
GDN: How do politics influence an architect in your opinion?
Stephen: Our practice is founded on a breadth of ethical principles that transcend political belief and remain valid across political transitions. The central ways in which politics broadly impacts architecture is first through the regulatory and financial frameworks it enacts and second, through the amount and type of investments it makes in civic infrastructure.
James: Politics directly and indirectly affect and influence architecture and architects. While principally benign politically, zoning, review committees, and clients alike may have underlying agendas which are inherently ‘political.’ We must work within the parameters of the spoken and unspoken rulesets we are provided, challenging those that might best benefit the project, the public, the users of the project and its long-term outcome. More recently, the profession recently dodged a governmental edict that would have established a ‘style-based’ architectural outcome for Federal projects. Fortunately, edicts such as these are rare in profession where an inclusive and holistic outcome is required to address the complexities we face as architects.
Our practice has been at the center of the transition from hand drawing to an entirely digitized form of architectural representation
GDN: What your advice would be for young architects and designers who are in the first stages of their career?
James: Embrace, engage and endure – have a passion for what you believe and what you produce. This isn’t a ‘job’, it is a profession. Invest in it and its outcomes. Have an appreciation for what Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘the greater good.’ Take risks. And do no harm.
Stephen: Become a careful observer of the world about you and all the architecture in it. Be curious about everything you see. Absorb it by taking the time to record it. Take it apart and put it back together again, preferably in ways that include drawing by hand as the eye to hand to mind connection is unforgettable. Become reflective.
GDN: Many a project by KieranTimberlake has won an International Architecture Award but also many American Architecture Awards by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum for Architecture and Design. What do you consider to be the catalyst for your success?
Stephen: We do not begin with a preconceived style or appearance, but rather with a comprehensive effort to identify circumstances of place, people, and purpose. We then forge an architecture that becomes elemental, simple, and timeless through our commitment to the art and craft of assembling materials and systems into beautiful and useful form.
James: Having a long view and remaining true to our beliefs, ethics, and principles, which underpin and are common to all of our projects.
What do you embrace? What do you remove? If something is removed, is the meaning destroyed? How does what you add, or replace, change the meaning?
2022 International Architecture Awards Honorable MenTION by The Chicago Athenaeum
@Photographs Courtesy of the Architects