Designing the Future: Judith Kinnard on Academia, the Profession, and Expanding Boundaries

By Julia Gamolina

Judith Kinnard, FAIA is a leader in architectural education and an award-winning designer. Kinnard is currently a professor at the Tulane School of Architecture, and started her teaching career at Syracuse University in 1979, shortly after completing her professional degree at Cornell. She was one of the first women teaching design studios at Syracuse, Princeton and the University of Virginia and was the first woman architect to be tenured at the University of Virginia. She taught at Virginia for twenty-two years where she served as chair of the architecture department from 1998-2003. She is the past-president of the National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). In 2018 she was recognized as an ACSA Distinguished Professor and in 2011, she was named one of the 25 Most Admired Educators by Design Intelligence.

Throughout her career, she has maintained an active commitment to practice. Her work has included numerous small-scale built commissions, and more than a dozen national competitions dealing with larger-scale issues of urban design, cultural institutions, and housing. She has received awards from the Virginia AIA, Louisiana AIA, the New Orleans AIA, and the Louisiana USGBC. Her essays on urban themes have been published by the Harvard Architecture Review and the Journal of Garden History. Her perspectives on the past and future of architectural education have been shared in two recent publications. “Catalyst: Trajectories and Lineages” (Actar 2016) and “Chronologies of and Architectural Pedagogy” (UPR 2015). In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Judith talks about her tenure in academia and in practice, and being the “first” of something, advising young architects to design their future.

JG: How did your interest in architecture first develop?

JK: I grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, a historic town outside of Boston. I was surrounded by early Colonial architecture, but it was actually modern architecture that I fell in love with as a teenager. I would often ride my bike past the Walter Gropius house in Lincoln, as well as a nearby house that Marcel Breuer designed. When I was fifteen, I visited Wright's Robie house in Chicago, and I was smitten. I still have a paper I wrote as a high school junior comparing it to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.

You’re a fellow Cornell alumna - what did you learn both about architecture and about yourself while studying there?

I first discovered that architecture school was not a supportive environment for students and a particularly brutal experience for women. There were no female faculty members.

However, what I really valued was the architectural history education I received from classes I took with Colin Rowe, Chris Otto and others. The history classroom and the design studio were integrated in ways we no longer see in schools. I was also at Cornell during a time of intense design instruction deriving from the formal language of Le Corbusier and, to a lesser degree, Mies and Aalto, and the theoretical underpinning of modernism helped to frame a number of issues that continued to be influential in my own design practice and teaching.

Greenline Master Plan, with the Tulane City Center

Greenline Shadewater Pavilion, with Irene Keil and the Tulane Small Center for Collaborative Design.

How did you get your start after you graduated?

I went back to Boston and worked there for nearly three years, mostly for Perry Dean Stahl and Rogers and then briefly for another firm. This was during a recession, which was a bleak time to be introduced to the profession - I worked on many projects that never got built, though I valued my time in the firm.

Like most of my classmates, I took the exams as soon as I could and was licensed when I began teaching. I have always thought that it is a problem when people engage in teaching right out of school. They later want to practice, and at that point it is difficult to complete the licensing hour requirements with a firm and complete the exams.

When did you focus fully on academia?

In the summer of my third year in practice, the dean at Syracuse University, Werner Seligman, called me and offered me a tenure track position. I had gotten to know him at Cornell; I was in his third-year design studio and produced several projects that clearly left an impression. So suddenly, I had this teaching opportunity – I was just twenty-five years old.

My five years at Syracuse with a number of very talented teachers was transformative for me – and it also allowed me to develop my own practice through a number of national design competitions. I also had my first leadership role there serving as the director of the school's Florence program for a year.

“There were no other women full-time at Princeton at the time, and I certainly didn’t want to seem “weaker” than my colleagues, so I went back to teach a week after my daughter was born. One week.”

What did you do next?

I met my husband at Syracuse a few years into my time there; he was also a Cornellian. We got married a couple of years later, and he was offered a position at the University of Virginia. I decided to leave Syracuse and work on our practice. I spent the spring semester working on competitions, one of which we won, and it turned into a commission, and applying for jobs. I was offered full-time, tenure track teaching positions at several very good schools, including one at Princeton - but not at UVA [laughs]. They told me I could be an adjunct faculty member, and that just wouldn’t work. There were also no full-time women on the faculty in architecture at that time.

I taught at Princeton for two utterly amazing years during a pivotal time at the school, and I met a lot of people I respected. I had amazing students and colleagues and I keep in touch with several of my former students from that period including Adam Yarinsky of ARO and Richard Maimon of Kieran Timberlake, and Sanda Iliescu. After two years though, I was offered a tenure-track position at UVA, so I settled in Charlottesville. My first daughter was born while I was at Princeton and it made sense for my husband and I to live in the same city.

Tell me about that.

Well, there were no other women full-time at Princeton at the time, and I certainly didn’t want to seem “weaker” than my colleagues, so I went back to teach a week after my daughter was born. One week.

Oh my god!

Ironically, my daughter ended up going to Princeton in Arts & Sciences seventeen years later [laughs]. But she was born on September 8th, and I taught all of that fall semester. Needless to say, there was quite a bit of sexism at Princeton too. This was in the eighties at one point - I was introduced by the dean once as, “the blonde in the room.” No one was trying to be evil; it was just full of people who were from a different time and world.

Given some of the sexism that still exists today despite so much awareness of it, I can’t imagine what it was like at a time when the same awareness wasn’t there. Was it at UVA that you became the first tenured design professor that was a woman?

Yes. There was one tenured history professor and one planning professor who were women, but none in design. I was at UVA for about twenty years, and it was a great place to teach and to practice. During that period we won four national design competitions with our practice, and this helped us develop a series of ideas involving architecture, urbanism and the landscape. Because we established a degree of national recognition, this led to my successful tenure case.

Then, I became Chair at UVA for five years, between ‘98 and 2003, working with Bill McDonough as the dean and three other wonderful chairs in landscape architecture, history of architecture, and planning. We introduced some themes that hadn’t been advanced in the past - design build and also studios that weren’t directly focused on buildings. I worked very hard to advance the dual-degree path with landscape architecture, facilitating a number of students to get both their Master of Architecture degree and their Master of Landscape Architecture degree. Thomas Woltz and Serena Nelson are great examples of this period in the school's history.

That’s fantastic. What did you do after UVA?

After a few years, my husband became the Dean at Tulane, in 2008. They offered me a full professor position with a generous endowed chair called the Harvey Wadsworth Chair in Landscape Urbanism, so we moved to New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina. We both felt compelled to contribute to the rebuilding of New Orleans in a more just and sustainable way. Some refer to “opportunity” in the post-Katrina setting, but we have avoided that word for obvious reasons. We felt that it was a responsibility.

The transition was a little bit tricky - I’ll say that being the wife of the dean was not my preferred role [laughs]. We’ve been very careful in our careers to maintain individual identities, so that aspect of it was a bit challenging. However, I had been asked to run for President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and a few years later, I was also elected as president of the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB). So I had my own leadership identity, independent of the school, while maintaining and advancing strong teaching goals at Tulane. That was important for me - the leadership roles I’ve had outside of academia were highly visible opportunities to show how one can combine teaching, research, creative work and national service to the profession. I hope that I have served as a good role model.

“...the leadership roles I’ve had outside of academia were highly visible opportunities to show how one can combine teaching, research, creative work and national service to the profession. ”

Going back to your time at UVA - what did it take to be the first of something? I ask this for the women who would like to do something for which there is no precedent within their gender. You can be what you can’t see.

By the time I was at UVA, the times were clearly changing. Although I was the first, the gender balance was certainly shifting. There were some women tenure-track professors who succeeded me in short succession, so I didn’t have that same sense of being “the only” like I did at Princeton, or Syracuse. Plus, UVA has a lot of other disciplines, and the landscape architecture department, history of architecture, and planning for example already had a number of women at that time.

When I became chair, I made sure that people got maternity and paternity leaves. I always saw myself as a mentor to women faculty and to women students. How could I not? I made a real effort as Chair to hire women, who later also became tenured. Hiring well and mentorship were important to me in my role. So I’d say the effect of being the first woman in something allowed more women to enter the faculty, and both male and female students benefited.

How did you get through some of the sexism that you’ve experienced, that you mentioned?

It’s a hard question to answer. Sometimes I didn’t take it personally. Sometimes I did. Meanwhile, I was also always getting support in other ways. One of the reasons that I loved doing competitions was that they were always such a pure form of evaluation - blind to gender. Competitions gave me an opportunity to be recognized for my design work at a high level without any conscious or unconscious bias coming into play – just through strong projects that captured the imagination of the juries involved.

What have been some of the other challenges for you?

One of the larger challenges for architecture faculty in the academic settings is the incredible demand that studio teaching has on your time - this is true for both men and women, although maybe more for women. Increasingly, the academy values research grants and publications, and does not know how to interpret creative practice. There’s an inherent dissonance in the intensity associated with teaching well and the values of the academic research institutions within which we operate. That produces enormous pressure, and can play a powerful role in the process of anyone who is working toward tenure and promotion to full professor.

Such pressure weighs on women with families. Among the earlier generation before me, many of the women in the academy and practice never had children because of the seemingly irresolvable demands on them uniquely, as opposed to the expectations placed on men. By the time I started teaching, women were and still are assigned to more committees, asked to advise and oversee things, run programs, and for years it seemed like all the committees had to have a woman. If there were only two or three women at an institution at the time, they were on virtually all the committees. That has changed, but the pressures of most architectural schools and academic settings have remained.

Through such a challenge, what are most proud of?

I’m proud of my students and the young faculty who I have mentored - I’ve loved seeing what they’re now doing with their lives. I recently noticed that I have sponsored or written letters for over two dozen of my former students, and more than half of these have been women.

“...the effect of being the first woman in something allowed more women to enter the faculty, and both male and female students benefited.”

Who are you admiring right now?

There are many - I really admire Meejin Yoon. I’m on the Cornell Architecture Art and Planning's Advisory Council and I’ve seen how she’s take on the challenges of that institution and how effectively she’s communicated the value of design in all of the disciplines within the school, and more broadly to the university setting. And, she’s doing all this while maintaining an amazing practice, and a family, and all sorts of other things that she does. In an odd coincidence, she was a fourth-year student of mine during the one and only semester when I taught at Cornell.

I also admire Adele Santos, because she is one of those women in our field who was a half generation or so ahead of me, and she has accomplished so many impressive things over the course of her career – as an architect and one of the first women who served as a department chair and then as dean at MIT.

What is your mission in the world of architecture? What’s the impact you’d like to have?

My mission has been both narrow and broad, from the individual to the industry, and focusing on architectural education and in helping to retain its standards while testing its boundaries. I have been interested in the way we’ve historically understood the discipline, and to advance the expansion into a broader set of questions that we as designers are extraordinarily well-equipped to address, especially now with issues of the environment.

With this in mind, what is your advice to those just starting their careers in architecture, and would your advice to women be any different?

Generally speaking, my advice would be to design your future, more than I did [laughs]. I feel like my career took an amazing pathway, but it wasn’t because I had charted it. I had a lot of good fortune, and part of it was being at the right place and knowing how to react to the opportunities that I found. But such a reactive or responsive approach is not the only way to succeed. I think students today are indeed trying to imagine where they’d like to be, both personally and professionally, in five to ten years, and making choices along the way that would make those things possible. Theirs is a good approach, and whenever I have a chance to support a student on this kind of journey, I go out of my way to do so.

In many ways, this is the same for both women and men. At the same time, I often say to students that women should get licensed fast. At least in my generation, people didn’t take you seriously if you weren’t licensed. To me it was important to be able call yourself an architect without reservation, and particularly for women, you don’t want anyone to call your credentials into question. I have worked with the leadership at NCARB to lower the barriers and to make the path a bit more seamless - to keep the pipeline moving in the right direction. Also, be aware that if you do want a family, there will be moments in your life when you may be more devoted to that. There are career trajectories and family trajectories, and these should not be perceived as mutually exclusive. At this point in our profession, there are hundreds of women who have proven this case, with increasing numbers in leadership positions within firms and schools of architecture. Navigation has always been important in life and in one's career.