Kim Yao: our most important project

On September 25 at the Gensler Family AAP NYC Center in New York City, Kim Yao will deliver this year's L. Michael Goldsmith Lecture, during which she will offer a tour of Architecture Research Office's diverse body of work and their foundational principles. In advance of this presentation, she shared insights drawn from her experiences in teaching and practice.

Molly Sheridan: How does the architect you are today compare with the expectations you may have had as a student when you considered the path you would follow?

Kim Yao: I actually feel really fortunate in that, in many ways, what I hoped to achieve in terms of type of work and type of practice is very much aligned with where I've landed. When I was a student, I had so many great teachers who were mentors for me. In many of those instances, those mentors became people who then hired me for my first teaching positions and became colleagues and lifelong friends. Who your teachers are when you're in school is very important. I looked to those mentors as examples of the kind of architect I wanted to be. I wanted to stay in New York City and have a smallish-sized practice that was focused on design work and where I could also teach. And that's what I do.

I don't think that's typical, and in some ways, it was not exactly as I had envisioned. There's a big bridge from the abstraction of what you think real life is going to be like to the reality of what it is like. Probably the biggest misalignment is not in terms of the ideals but where I actually spend the majority of my time - how much time and care is spent on the business, on client relationships, on mentoring, and on strategically thinking through how to design the practice itself. The design of the office, we say, is our most important project. And that's true: How do we continue to make how we practice better? So much quality time is spent stewarding the way we work, the processes, and these in-between spaces that are less overtly about the design work but are absolutely critical to enabling it.

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