Re-Emergence: Nina Cooke John on Urban Engagement, Developing a Skill Set, and Pursuing it All in Turn

By Julia Gamolina

Nina is the founder of Studio Cooke John, a New York-based design studio with a strong focus on high-impact, residential architecture, as well as design for international cultural institutions. Born in Jamaica, Nina earned her B.Arch at Cornell University, and her M.Arch at Columbia GSAPP, now teaching at the Parsons School for Design. Nina's work was recently featured in Dwell Magazine’s “13 Extraordinary Women in Design and Architecture You Need to Know” and the Center for Architecture’s exhibition, Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture. In her conversation with Julia Gamolina, Nina talks about her experiences as an architect, an academic, and a mother, advising those just starting their careers to remember that there are many ways to be an architect.

JG: How did your interest in architecture first develop?

NCJ: I originally thought I’d be a doctor, so math, physics, chemistry and biology were what I focused on in high school. In the school system in Jamaica, you also have to choose pretty early on what you want to do, so I had stopped taking art classes. Somehow in my last year though, I decided I wanted to become an architect. I don’t remember exactly what spurred it, I didn’t know any architects, but once I decided, I started taking painting and ceramics classes in the evenings at the local art school

What did you learn in studying architecture? Both about the field and about yourself.

From Jamaica, I first went to City College in New York. There, one of my first professors was Susie Rodriguez, who was at Polshek - now Ennead - for a long time, and who now has her own firm. She encouraged me to transfer to Cornell, her alma mater, and I did! Once I landed in architecture, I totally loved it. It was nothing like I thought it would be. We were dealing with really conceptual ideas of form, space, and order, and I was totally into it. I also learned that I was good at making things with my hands. I hadn’t ever been someone who sewed or had done crafts, but model-making became my primary means of creative exploration. I worked through the iterative design process by making tons of study models.

I learned that I was indeed super creative, even though my school years were focused on science and logic. There was a part of me that was willing to push the limits and constantly ask, “What if?” Combining that intuitive part of me that made my hands work, and then analyzing and assessing and fine-tuning based on what the logical parameters might be, really worked for me. Architecture allowed me to use both sides of my brain.

Scene from "Power in the Dark” night time competition entry

How did you get your start in the field?

I graduated from Cornell in 1995, and I was in one of the first few classes that was coming out of architecture school into a decent economy. I spent the summer in Ithaca working on campus, putting my portfolio together, and reaching out to firms that I had researched in the library. This was pre-internet [laughs]. In September of ‘95, I started working at Voorsanger and Associates, a really good place for me to start. There were only five or six people working there at the time, and on really interesting projects. I worked on a synagogue in the Bronx, on various projects for NYU, as well as some really large residential projects around the country. Because the office was so small, I learned from everyone in the practice. We still get together now, however many years later [laughs].

When did you eventually get to Ennead?

I had always known that I had wanted to teach, so, after Voorsanger, I pursued my Masters at Columbia. This felt like a good complement to the education I had gotten at Cornell. Columbia was doing really avant-garde and experimental things at the time, with Bernard Tschumi as Dean. After graduation, I got a call from Susie Rodriguez, saying that they had an opening at Polshek.

There were at least 80 people at Polshek at the time, so the atmosphere was quite different than what I had experienced at Voorsanger. I was working on larger projects and projects for cultural institutions, like the Hudson Hotel, master-planning projects for the New York Botanical Gardens and St. John the Divine, library competitions, and the Biltmore Theatre. What I learned there wasn’t only about the design work on paper, it was also about project systems, management, and the dynamics of working in a large office with lots of different personalities. I also honed my client relationship skills through the interaction with the heads of non-profit organizations who were our clients.

“Combining that intuitive part of me that made my hands work, and then analyzing and assessing and fine-tuning based on what the logical parameters might be, really worked for me.”

What did you do next?

My last day at Polshek was essentially the first day of my maternity leave for my first child, which happened to be a few days before September 11th. My daughter was born on September 17th. That’s when I made a significant shift career-wise to being a full-time academic. I got a tenure-track position at Syracuse University. With my baby and nanny, I would drive up to Syracuse on Monday mornings in time for studio at 2pm, and would drive back into the city on Friday nights after studio ended at 6pm.

I absolutely loved those years and the work I was doing there. I loved re-engaging the academic exploration that I had been doing myself in school, and particularly looking at how urban subcultures appropriate space in different cities. My thesis project at Cornell looked at the West Indian community in different areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and how interstitial spaces could be re-appropriated and reprogrammed. I brought that interest into the academic sphere by writing, presenting, and getting students out to do exploratory research on the urban environment.

When did you get back into practice?

I was teaching for a few years, but couldn’t maintain the constant back-and-forth commuting by the time I was pregnant with my second child. Also, there wasn’t much opportunity in Syracuse for my husband, since he wasn’t an academic. Once I was back in the city, I started teaching at Parsons. I also reconnected with a friend of mine from Polshek who had started her own practice. I started freelancing quite a bit with her, doing primarily residential projects. That’s when I started developing my own experience at that scale; honing my skills in understanding construction details, negotiating with clients, and managing employees.

I did that for a while, and then started my own practice in 2012 with a colleague. We branched off together primarily because we both had young kids and needed more flexibility. If we needed to be at school drop-off, or participate in other school activities one day, and then work into the night, we could, as we were both in the same position with similar schedules. That flexibility was the primary impetus for starting that collaboration.

At the same time, I was really engaged in various things around my kids’ school and the rest of the community. For the PTA, I planned the MLK day of service every year, coordinating parents’ donations of meals to be delivered to home-bound seniors throughout the town. For many years I was on the Board of the Montclair Public Library Foundation and the Board of the Harlem School of the Arts. More recently I’ve been involved with Montclair Design Week. All these activities, unrelated to practice, added to my professional skill set. I now understand so much more about community engagement, non-profit leadership, and fundraising.

Cornell University NYC Housing Studio Final Review. Photography by Dorothy Francis

When did you finally go off completely on your own?

As my kids got older, I felt like I was ready to do more, and re-engage in the architectural world in a way that I hadn’t been doing for a while. That’s when, a few years ago, I went fully on my own.

Where do you feel like you’re in your career today?

I do feel like I’m at an interesting juncture. Now that my children are older, I’m devoting more time to my architecture practice. “Re-emerging” in a way. Even though I’ve been working the whole time [laughs].

I’d like my practice to become a truly interdisciplinary one. At Parsons, I teach a course in Design Strategy with a focus on innovation, in addition to a course in the First Year program that encourages students to reflect on the urban experience using multiple media. This has brought me back to my interest in urban engagement and the role of the architect in the public sphere.

How are you doing that?

I recently entered a ‘Night Time’ ideas competition when London was considering its night economy as they were contemplating having the tube run all night. The entry explored women walking alone at night. Wandering through city streets at night is supposed to be surreal, but women don’t have the privilege of engaging this experience, mostly because of fear of attack. The entry proposed urban interventions that would help women gain the confidence to walk at night without fear – taking back the night.

As part of Montclair Design week, I designed tools for an interactive community workshop to re-envision street life along the main thoroughfare in town. The workshop was a collaboration with Bike&Walk Montclair and Arterial Design, a street design studio. I’d like to incorporate more of this kind of work; envisioning through co-design, as part of the community-engagement aspect of the firm.

“Your path might be circuitous and take you in all kinds of directions, but the skills you pick up along the way are all very valuable.”

I love that Nina, especially ideas around safety at night. There have to be other things women can do other than walking with their keys out.

Yes! I’ve done a few pecha kucha presentations of the nighttime project, and I get so many women coming up to me after to tell me the things that they do when walking at night. One woman came up to me and said that she sings really loudly as she walks, another woman said she would walk in the middle of the street. Women are more likely to get attacked by people they know, rather than by a stranger, so the premise of the project was more to give women the confidence to walk alone. If a woman is more confident, she is less likely to be targeted. I have a lot more ideas for advancing this project.

Looking back on your career, what have been some of the biggest challenges?

At the point when I was still teaching design studio three times a week and practicing and had three small kids, I remember feeling like I wasn’t doing any one of those things really well. I learned a lot from the experience; focus and efficiency to name a few, but I felt like I was spread really thin.

I could pick my kids up from school, but couldn’t engage with them for too long after, or on the other hand, if there was a professional talk or event at Parsons or elsewhere, I couldn’t stay to attend because I had to rush home. At times, it would be too much on all fronts. I realized that, yes, you can have everything, but maybe not all at the same time. Your path might be circuitous and take you in all kinds of directions, but the skills you pick up along the way are all very valuable.

Lobby/Waiting Room Renovation, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan New Jersey, Newark NJ. Photography by Lisa Russman Photography.

Chelsea loft kitchen detail. Photography by Ball and Albanese.

That’s a great attitude. On this positive note, what have been some highlights?

I loved being a full-time academic. I look back on that time really fondly. I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or the fact that a lot of it was self-directed exploration. Syracuse created reading groups for young tenure-track faculty who were at a similar academic stage, but in different departments. They paid for lunch for the four of us once a month and we would meet and discuss after having read each others’ writing. In addition to the work I was doing teaching architecture studio and seminars, this all made my time at Syracuse truly fulfilling.

Who are you admiring right now?

I still love the work that Susie Rodriguez is doing, working with cultural institutions and applying her design thinking at multiple scales. I also really like both Studio Gang and WXY, both for their urban, community engagement projects, and the multidisciplinary nature of their firms; working on skyscrapers as well as doing really strategic work bringing design of value to people in different communities.

“Great design should not be reserved for private spaces.”

What’s your core mission? What’s the main impact you’d like to have on the world?

Similar to these firms, I’d like my practice to be significantly driven by community-engagement and the quest to understand how design principles, that are clearly of value on so many levels, can be accessible to everyone. Great design should not be reserved for private spaces.

Education is a big deal to me. Access to education is a primary source of economic mobility for kids all around the world. Locally, I see the inequity in educational opportunities, and the economic disparity that cause an achievement gap. Recently someone was talking to me about an idea for an educational space, where disadvantaged students can go to for enrichment through working interactively with the space in this really particular way. The space itself facilitates creative exploration. This idea was so fascinating to me because it seemed to embody the idea that the physical space could address, and solve, a critical societal problem.

Finally, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers in the field.

There are a lot of different paths in architecture! When I first started out, I thought that coming out with an architecture degree meant that you had to be doing this one specific thing. I’ve learned that there are so many paths that you can take with your architecture skill set, whether you become a “traditional architect,” or you go on to construction management, or design-build, or you become a furniture designer, or you’re running an NGO that deals with housing development. There are many, many options that are available. It’s important to finish your degree, even if you know you’re not going to be sitting in an office, drawing up plans [laughs].