James Timberlake, FAIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: James Timberlake, FAIA, is a founding partner of Kieran Timberlake Associates LLP, based in Philadelphia. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Endowed Professor in Sustainability at the University of Washington College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Timberlake has served as the Eero Saarinen Distinguished Professor of Design at Yale University, Max Fisher Chair at the University of Michigan, and has taught at Princeton University, the University of Texas at Austin, and other institutions. He has co-authored two books: Manual, The Architecture of KieranTimberlake, and refabricating Architecture. Timberlake’s forthcoming book, Loblolly House: Elements of a New Architecture, (written with Stephan Kieran, FAIA) is a case study of their award-winning residential project. Kieran Timberlake is the recipient of the 2008 AIA Firm Award.

Education
I have a bachelor of environmental studies from the University of Detroit, an MArch from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Rome Prize through the American Academy in Rome in 1982-83. I always consider that part of my education.

How would you describe your firm’s work?
Inventive, innovative, and design-oriented.

Favorite project
It’s hard to say what project is the favorite. What I would say is that my favorite project is one that is extraordinarily difficult as a program and a problem to solve. That generally defines the nature of the projects that the office takes on, so I think they’re all intriguing and interesting from that point of view.

When and why did research become a cornerstone of Kieran Timberlake’s design methodology?
Steve and I identified back at the inception of the firm in 1984 that we would be interested in deeply understanding the background of the design problems that we were going to tackle, but it became part of the practice formally when we were the inaugural winners of the AIA College of Fellows Benjamin Latrobe Research Fellowship in 2001.

At that particular point, we embedded research as a principal piece of our process in what we do, so it now informs and is involved in every aspect of the firm’s work—whether we write books, do buildings, talk and lecture, or teach. Receiving that award was an enabler that allowed Steve and me to create full-time permanent research positions within our office that are now led by a director of research, and by the end of the year will involve 4-6 full-time people.

How do you integrate their research into your practice?
Depending on what kind of research it is or what topics we’re investigating, they may be part of a design team for a period of time, or they may be working independently on non-applied research topics that are instigators to other opportunities. In that way, they are widely involved in every aspect of the firm. We’ve embedded people from design teams into the research team and vice versa, so that information can be exchanged and investigations can be taken quite deeply.

KTA was interested in sustainable design before LEED®. Where did that interest originate?
I think it comes out of Steve’s and my training in school at the University of Pennsylvania, when Ian McHarg taught the landscape courses and was the chairman of the landscape architecture department. That was deeply embedded in some of the teaching back in the 1970s.

Some of the first projects that we attempted to do this on go back to the mid-early 1990s, such as the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pa. In that project, we tried to assemble a palette of materials that, at that particular time, would have been thought of as pretty highly sustainable material products, including cork flooring, slate walls, and engineered wood products. We call it an environmental ethic, and that environmental ethic has been deeply embedded in our design processes well before LEED. I think we try to do projects when clients come to us such as Middlebury College, and say: “Look, we’re interested in environmentally ethical project, but we don’t necessarily want to follow the LEED practices.” I think we’re comfortable with that, because we realize we can take a building deep in the sustainable realms without necessarily having a checklist to tick off.

That’s where we would hope that the profession gets. We appreciate that the U.S. Green Building Council has been very kind and gracious to us, and we’ve been very supportive of in turn. There needs to be a mechanism such as LEED in order to bring the profession along, but I think we would hope—as does the USGBC—that these processes become so deeply engrained in architects’ practices that eventually we don’t have to necessarily have a checklist to do this.

But architects need to be retrained, and that’s one way of getting retrained.

What’s happening with the Make It Right project in New Orleans?
We’re lucky to say that we have anywhere from one to three homes being selected by occupants down there. One of our prototypes is being put through design development right now, and we hope, in the next six months or so, somebody will be living in one of our houses. We’re very excited about that. We’re all hoping that that will be one of many.

We personally have contributed financially beyond our time. We’ve contributed a significant sum of money through our lecturing to Make It Right, and we would hope that architects would also help contribute financially to building a home through one of the prototypes that they find interesting. They can contribute directly to one of those prototypes and enhance the accessibility of that particular prototype to one of the families in New Orleans so that more of these houses can get built.

On receiving the AIA Firm Award
Well, it’s first and foremost an immense and tremendous honor to be recognized by your peers in the profession with this award. Steve Kieran, myself, and the rest of the firm find that immensely humbling and a tremendous honor. That said, I think Steve and I and the firm don’t feel we’re done. We feel that this is a starting point rather than an ending point.

What are you reading?
I’m reading the book City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre with my son, who’s ten and a half. Steve and I teach a master’s design research laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. We took all of our students to India and Bangladesh this spring as part of our laboratory exploration, and my son went along with us. So to read the book is a follow-up to that trip. It’s about a family in India and their experiences. It’s just a tremendously fascinating book.

Sources of inspiration
Inspiration comes from a variety of sources. There have been numerous individuals and projects that have inspired me and inspired the firm, and I think that, like a library of books, you never quite leave them behind—they become something that you consistently refer to over time. Back in the days of my early education in architecture school, Buckminster Fuller was heavily involved with the University of Detroit, as he was with many educational institutions. Lou Kahn certainly inspired us even prior to coming to the University of Pennsylvania, even though he died the week I was accepted. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have been inspirations to Steve and me along the way, and then there have been the more commonplace inspirations, such as traveling to Boeing and to Daimler Chrysler plants that led to refabricating Architecture.

To bring this full circle, the reason I brought up the book is that in the end, what’s inspired us recently has really been these moments such as Katrina and the plight of some of the individuals in the Ninth Ward, and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve contributed as we have to Make It Right. In the case of India and Bangladesh, four days in India in Ahmedabad and four days in Dhaka have really transformed our thinking about how architecture can be useful and be seen as transformative to the lives of others. Talking for a couple of hours with individuals in Dhaka who need housing can really change one’s outlook on life and what this profession can offer.

Although I can’t name one individual, I have to say that the panoply in the library—in the pantheon of those individuals who have inspired us—I think right now our inspiration is Mrs. Rogers in New Orleans who took the time to investigate our house and has selected our house as the one that she wants to live in because it meets her needs. I think we learn from that.