James Timberlake

What is the most fulfilling part of your job?
To not consider it a job or work. I wanted to be an architect since I was 5. I love doing what I/we do—all of it.

What are the biggest challenges facing designers today?
If they are architects, to not narrowly define themselves as "designers." Architecture and design is holistic; a combination of art and science enabled through a core of business. You have to do it all.

What is the best thing you've learned in the past 10 years?
That kids are brilliant. Listen to your kids.

What advice would you give to clients on how to create a sustainable project?
Consider life cycle values and consider long-term opportunities over initial term first costs. Particularly in the United States too many are still focused on what it costs up front, tuning out what the longer-term opportunities are. We are too enamored in this country with more for less. Perhaps we should begin thinking about more for more? Or less for less?

What inspired your career choices?
Watching construction. Something about making buildings at age 5. That was before I heard of Frank Lloyd Wright or any other architect. There was something magical about drawing buildings and spaces, and then having them move from a virtual, imaginary world into something real, tangible, experiential. We have as much fun in the office as out on the project construction site. All of it is fulfilling.

What would you consider to be your most exciting recent discovery?
Sleep? If I revealed my most exciting recent discovery, I would be giving away design and intellectual property that isn't ready for prime time. We'll have to see if it proves to be the "most exciting." Stay tuned.

how do you foresee the future of design changing?
The coming revolution is already happening in academia. Shortly, we will dump the Beaux-Arts methodologies of singular projects, charrette to death, and then hackneyed by visiting juries, for collective projects that have a basis in real time, real work, and the real world, better preparing those coming into the design professions for how they will work, interact, make, and realize what is being envisioned.

It will continue to speed up. There will be less time to execute more work—the democratization of design tools (see "Sketchup"). Increased reliance and dependency on 3-D, 4-D, 5-D visualization tool sets—the Holy Grail being full and complete visualization of all of the project prior to executing it (therefore the prototype is complete and the built work is a result of the visualization prototype); continued (re)integration of systems, services, and delivery methods; less and less reliance on singular intelligence—continued and increasing applications of collective intelligence—therefore less and less permeation of "heroes."

What advice would you give to A&D students starting out in the field?
Have a long view. Ignore the glory of the short-term gains for having a vision that goes out much farther and deeper. Too many get caught up in the early glory.

How would you define success?
Peace and tranquility. Harmony. Serenity.

What do you find to be the most exhilarating interior space you have ever been in?
Most exhilarating?  We were just in Dhaka and in Louis Kahn's Parliament Building. Wow!  But perhaps that is purely a powerful (series of) space(s).

Most exhilarating? (sound of time ticking......) The Pantheon. 

What do you consider to be the worst invention of the last 100 years?
There are too many tied for top honors—from power and environmentally consumptive devices to toxic products to time wasters. The television (TV) seems to encompass all of those particularly with the proliferation of the visual and intellectual garbage that has overtaken the airwaves with the expansion of cable and satellite networks.

What are your thoughts on receiving the 2008 AIA Architecture Firm Award?
It was humbling.  It is the end of the first phase of our firm and the beginning of the second.  We have lots and lots of hard work to do to live up to this.  We're truly grateful for the honor and the recognition.  So many people work as hard as we do.  We're truly fortunate.

What would you like to leave as your legacy?
My children? Professionally, I am not sure you can define this at the age we are at.  We're young—perhaps you focus on legacies at a later age? I truly hope we have many, many more years of this; this fun, this challenge, this mission, these opportunities.


Stephen Kieran, FAIA

What are the biggest challenges facing designers today?
The breadth of the linked sustainability crises we face: the environment coupled with the productivity decline (cost increases out of proportion to the rest of the economy, increases rather than improvements in time to build, and poor quality of construction).

What is the best thing you've learned in the past 10 years?
How to couple passion with patience.

What advice would you give to A&D students or those just starting out in the field?
There has never been a better time—our work is in demand. We have the opportunity to become broadly relevant to society. Seize the day.

What advice would you give to clients on how to create a sustainable project?
Revise how you look at the world and the actual cost of all that we do. Get creative. Find a way to make the environment part of every equation you evaluate. Work in an integrated way with all collaborators in the room at the same time throughout design. Add nothing, integrate everything.

What inspired your career choices?
I decided to become an architect after my second year in college while spending a summer working at an industrial development bank in Athens and visiting archaeological sites in Greece. I made the actual decision in a single moment on my way home after that summer during an unplanned visit to Le Corbusier's Swiss Pavilion in Zurich.

What are your thoughts on receiving the 2008 AIA Architecture Firm Award?
James and I were not together when we learned about the award. We both had nearly the same emotions: The first was overwhelming humility that our peers held us in this esteem. The second response that followed almost immediately was a question: How do we honor the honor? How do we live up to this trust? What is next? We are not at all satisfied with where we have been, and we look at this award as a provocative beginning to what we can and should offer.

What would you like to leave as your legacy?
Profound and deep change in the way we go about what we do. Change that not only allows us to make beautiful, desirable architecture formed with an environmental ethic in less time and for less money, but higher quality architecture with enhanced performance. Who would not want this?

How do you foresee the future of design changing?
We are increasingly being asked to assume responsibility for not just the appearance of what we design, but for its performance. This is a sea change in expectation. Like the medical profession, we will be required to assume responsibility for monitoring and following up on our buildings and suggesting and implementing enhancements to their performance. In time we will come to see this as positive, and we will form a deep environmental ethic and aesthetic about these responsibilities.

What do you consider to be your greatest professional achievement?
Forming our practice, work, writing, and teaching, around a core research agenda. As a profession, architects chronically under-fund research and development.  We hope to show a way forward that moves research to the center of all that we do. 

What is the most fulfilling part of your job?
Actually building what we design. There is no better high than walking into and through what you helped conceive.

How would you define success?
Leaving at least some small part of the world better than you found it.


What do you find to be the most exhilarating interior space you have ever been in?
Louis Kahn’s Parliament Building in Dacca, Bangladesh.

What do you consider to be the worst invention of the last 100 years?
Air Conditioning.

What would you consider to be your most exciting recent discovery?
The power of monitoring what we do, learning from it and doing it better the next time. Architects are very good at planning and doing, but we are awful at monitoring and learning from what we have done.

Notable projects by KieranTimberlake Associate: Melvin J. and Claire Levine Hall, University of Pennsylvania; Atwater Commons, Middlebury College; West Campus Residential Initiative, Cornell University; SmartWrap: The Building Envelope of the Future; Pierson and Davenport College,Yale University; Loblolly House; Sidwell Friends Middle School; Sculpture Building and Gallery, Yale University.