The Power of Diversity: Practice in a Complex World

Summary: At the upcoming AIA 2009 National Convention in San Francisco, Kulapat Yantrasast is one of 10 emerging voices featured at the Saturday plenary session—Focus on Contemporary Architecture: Critical and New Opinions—where award-winning architects will present their work in a fast-paced presentation of dynamic images, animations, and film and video clips, followed by a moderated panel discussion.

What I try to do is to learn and respect new ideas and see how different ways of thinking, lateral thinking, could help to enhance my own perspective.

Kulapat Yantrasast, Assoc. AIA, is a founder of wHY Architecture, which Newsweek calls one of the most innovative architectural practices for the new generation. Yantrasast, who worked closely with AIA Gold Medalist and Pritzker Prize recipient Tadao Ando, formed the collaborative workshop with Yo-ichiro Hakomori. wHY Architecture’s work spans many project types and includes innovative public projects for the arts and the environment. The Grand Rapids Art Museum, which opened in 2007, was the first new art museum in the world to receive the LEED-Gold certification. Other recent work includes the new Tyler Museum of Art, in Tyler, Texas; and the expansion and renovation of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. The firm is also renovating the galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago and working on the Art Bridge at the Los Angeles River, which is to be built from trash salvaged from the river it spans.

What is your design aesthetic and approach to form-making?
Open and flexible mind through inventive design with no style.

How does this approach apply to the new Grand Rapids Art Museum?
The Grand Rapids Art Museum tries to be a museum for everyone and for the city of Grand Rapids. We were not trying to outsmart or be “intelligent” about anything; we just tried our hardest to make something very simple work very well. The experience in it is very open and flexible. It is inviting and not at all intimidating. We tried to reinvent what an art museum should serve as, and how to do that in the simplest, yet greenest way we could. The inventive nature of the building is not to try to invent a new form or new style. If it tries to be inventive, it does so in providing a new museum‘s experience and a new realization of a museums' role for people's lives today.

What motivates you? How do you inspire your employees?
Ideas. I believe in architecture as a medium for thoughts and ideas, and I try to inspire our staff and people who we work with or work for with ideas.

Do you have a best practice tip that architects can relate to in their own firms?
This one comes from my father. You will never be rich choosing to be an architect, so you need to realize why you are in the profession. I love being an architect because everyday I am able to work on ideas I like with people I respect. If I can’t make that work, it will be double hell—no money and no fun! That is definitely a bad choice to avoid.

What do you hope attendees will carry back with them to their practices?
I want them to carry back some sparks in the head and warmth in the heart that architecture still has its unique power, and we are in the profession with the potential to harness it and the responsibility for it.

Can you explore the tie in between the broad-based backgrounds of wHY Architecture’s principals and staff, and the AIA National Convention theme, “The Power of Diversity: Practice in a Complex World?”
Diversity is everywhere now. Who is not diverse? What I try to do is learn and respect new ideas and see how different ways of thinking, lateral thinking, could help to enhance my own perspective. Diversity must also mean unity, if it is to have power at all. I do not believe in diversity for its own purpose, diversity must yield unity and strength. The solution is for each of us to discover our own.

Why should AIA members attend your session?
With so much variety of thoughts and diversity of strategies within an hour and a half, I'd say, "Why not?"