A Life of Creativity: Mikyoung Kim on Places That Bring Health and Wellness and Landscape as a Vehicle for Positive Change

By Julia Gamolina

Mikyoung Kim, founding principal of Mikyoung Kim Design, blends art and science, shaping restorative landscapes. Her studio is an innovative group of architects, landscape architects, and artists, exploring an interdisciplinary practice.

Mikyoung Kim is the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Medal of Excellence and her studio won the 2022 ASLA Firm Award. Her work is celebrated in the Smithsonian's "American Voices Collection" and by visitors to her sites around the world. An Olmsted Scholar, Mikyoung's influence extends through lectures, teaching and accolades, as a visionary in inclusive, sensitive landscape architecture and environmental art. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Mikyoung talks about her sonic training that informs her creativity in design, and how to go beyond form and beauty to create places of wellness, advising those just starting their careers to find something to care about.

You started as a concert pianist at Oberlin College — this is exceptional, and I know the amount of discipline and drive for this focus is not insignificant. Tell me about your time as a pianist, and what you've learned that you still tap into today.

Music has always been a sanctuary for me. The sonic world was a language that I intuitively understood at a very young age and loved as a world to escape to. I started playing piano when I was five years old and it was something that I did very seriously, practicing many hours a day.

For me, music is a creative medium that is very architectural — it has a framework of rhythm and tonal structure that defines the immersive experience of listening and I learned through music that intensity and focus are an important part of creating this experience. There’s a scalar consideration for each piece of music that is also very architectural — in all kinds of music both classical and jazz. I also learned about a world that can be created without the visual, which I think is very important in the multi-sensory experience of the landscape. In music, both the global and the detailed scale matter, and each informs the other. Without the detail, the larger sonic experience is lost. This is something that I take with me in designing with the natural world.

How did your focus shift to landscape architecture, and how did you choose where you studied landscape architecture?

When I was in college at Oberlin Conservatory, I developed tendonitis in my left wrist and arm and had to pause all work that I was doing on the instrument. At that time, I was so grateful to have the opportunity to take other classes in the college and began to study environmental art, sculpture, and art history. I was fascinated by both the land art movement as well as work by Noguchi who worked in more urban environments.

I went on to study at Harvard to continue this interest and was able to spend my final year in a self-designed thesis program between the MIT VES program and the Harvard GSD. It was there that I became interested in understanding urban play and designing places that draw people in, and immerse visitors into the landscape.

“This global pandemic has helped us to understand the important role that landscape plays in healthfulness...We know that 20% of our U.S. population does not exist in one sigma spread or traditional notions of the band of normality. So, how do we design considering a wider sigma spread to create a truly inclusive design?”

— Mikyoung Kim

Eventually, how did you start your practice? How has it evolved, and what are you focused on these days?

After living in San Francisco for a few years and exploring the landscape there through multi-week-long backpacking hikes through Mount Shasta and Big Sur, I was offered an assistant professor teaching position at the Rhode Island School of Design and I moved back to the East Coast. In the beginning, it was a startup — literally above the garage in an apartment I rented in Providence Rhode Island. I worked collaboratively with my students in the fine arts, landscape, and architecture at all hours exploring ideas and developing a sense of how the landscape can make our lives better. At the time I was working on the Cheonggycheon Seoul River project as I was also working on some urban playgrounds in Hartford pro bono, which are two examples of very different scales of how we can engage the natural world in these highly urbanized environments.

It was during this period that I started to understand the importance of human health and well-being. We started working on the Crown Sky Garden at the Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago and the Chicago Botanic Garden Regenstein Nature Learning Center and understanding the physiological and psychological impact that landscape materials and systems have on the brain, and the way that nature can normalize how our mind and bodies function.

Over the past decade with the black lives matter movement I have become more focused on ways in which inclusion can be defined through design with neurodiversity in mind. To expand and go deeper – beyond the color of our skin or our gender to find ways that we can understand how our brains respond to the designed world and how we can expand the spectrum of consideration as we design in public parks, plazas, and playgrounds.

140 West Plaza: Exhale, Chapel Hill, NC.

Mikyoung Kim Design site inspection for details of Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital: Crown Sky Garden, Chicago, IL.

Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?

Being a designer, disappointment is a part of the process. I think time has helped to shed light on why things evolve the way that they do. When I look back on the projects that I wanted to work on that I didn’t win…I think that now I feel like if I had gotten them, then I wouldn’t have pursued the other projects that have helped to shape the thought leadership of our studio. Life is not a linear process and resilience in building the public realm emerges from a process that is about open discovery and accepting the pathway that comes out of both good luck and setbacks.

From the beginning I have been interested in landscape as a vehicle for positive change. That is the ethical practice that we have built. having that as the basis of design has also helped me understand why we pursue certain projects over others. It goes beyond monetizing design but has an authentic framework that shapes the process of building the firm. What is the metric for success? For real estate folks it’s about dollars per square footage. For us, it’s about ways in which we can strengthen neighborhoods one person at a time.

“We always talk about luck at the beginning of a life of creativity. I think it’s important to be ready for that luck, and that is hard work. There are no shortcuts.”

— Mikyoung Kim

What have you also learned in the last six months? What are you most excited about right now?

This global pandemic has helped us to understand the important role that landscape plays in healthfulness. We have a research group within our studio that is focused on neurodiversity and understanding the next fifty to one hundred years of urban design. Taking the bones of the last golden age of cities like Detroit and Houston, which are majority-minority cities, and understanding innovation and neurodiversity in the twenty-first century. We know that 20% of our U.S. population does not exist in one sigma spread or traditional notions of the band of normality. So, how do we design considering a wider sigma spread to create a truly inclusive design?

Who are you admiring now and why?

I admire our neighbors that we work with in the communities that we serve. I admire the parents and families who advise us on our design within hospitals — families that have lost children in pediatric hospitals like Boston Children’s and find a way to seek out hope even when the worst has happened. When we meet some of these families we understand that their first night in the hospital is the worst day of their life. Our work is really important to these folks, and we explore all of the ways in which we can help them escape the sounds and tenor of the clinical environment to see the sky. I admire the mom who breastfeeds her young child at the Crown Sky Garden while her elder child is in surgery. I admire people who overcome immense adversity and show us their generosity and ability to help make the world better.

Mikyoung Kim at Farrar Pond Garden, Private Residence, Lincoln, MA. By Chris Barker.

What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?

I spoke about this earlier — I am building a practice that is an ethical one — our core mission in the studio is to understand more deeply a wider sigma-spread of folks that inhabit our cities and create a way of designing that is more diverse and inclusive. We are currently studying the physiological effects of noise on the body, with elevated levels of cortisol that affect our pulse rate and adrenaline and trigger our fight or flight hormones. We have been working with the acoustic community to understand the physical damage that both sustained and brief noises can create in our sense of isolation, depression, and early death in city life. It’s exciting to see that our work is not just about form and beauty but that we can create places that bring about health and wellness in real ways using psychological and scientific research as the basis of design.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?

We always talk about luck at the beginning of a life of creativity. I think it’s important to be ready for that luck, and that is hard work. There are no shortcuts. As a woman of color, I accept that I have to work hard to do the work that I love. I think that the world becomes a better place when designers invest a lifetime of practice, like in music, in finding a voice that brings whimsy, resiliency, and transformation to our everyday lives. My advice is the same for everyone — care about something, work on things that are beyond short-term rewards, and work hard for the people who have entrusted you with their future environment.