Living Better Together: nARCHITECTS' Mimi Hoang on Radical Empathy, Regional Projects, and Organizing Space Around Experiences
Portrait by Brian Shumway.
By Julia Gamolina
Mimi Hoang co-founded nARCHITECTS with Eric Bunge with a belief in architecture as an agent of positive change that can connect people and environments in unexpected ways. An ambition to respond to changes in contemporary life while fostering social engagement guides her work. Mimi teaches graduate design studios at Columbia University’s GSAPP. She received her M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her Bachelor in Art and Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Mimi talks about the start of her firm with “almost buildings,” domestic life in urban contexts, and the parameters within the pluralistic contexts she is working in, advising those just starting their careers to have the confidence to put themselves and their ideas out there.
JG: nARCHITECTS won Cooper Hewitt's 2023 National Design Award— congratulations! On the heels of this honor, what are you most looking forward to advancing in 2024? What's most important to you and your practice as we come out of the pandemic, return to work, etc?
MH: Thank you! It’s an enormous honor, but it’s funny how nothing changes in a way, after winning something as gratifying as the NDA. Since the pandemic, Eric and I have focused on regional projects with more conviction. In 2017, we finished two projects—a skyscraper abroad and the NYS Equal Rights Heritage Center in Auburn, a small town in upstate NY. We did not have control over the skyscraper project in the end, evidenced by the major design changes that were made without informing us. I realized that our skyscraper client viewed design as a commodity and architects as expendable, fashionable brands.
In contrast, the town of Auburn came with jubilation to the opening of the center, the first municipal building to be built there in forty years. Many of them had collaborated with us during the programming and brainstorming sessions for the exhibition content and were enthralled by their community’s new “living room.” It cemented our desire to work closer to home, and for communities with whom we could engage and collaborate. I think of Glenn Murcutt, who famously refused all commissions outside of his native Australia, because he wanted to build in the climate and soil that he intimately understood.
Navy Pier Chicago. Photography by Iwan Baan.
ADO. Photography by Frank Oudeman.
Coming back to the beginning, you are described as being "born in the tropics of Vietnam and trained in Amsterdam and New York City." Tell me about what you take from each of these places for your work today.
Yes, I always joke that my body was not built for the cold of New York because I was born in the tropics of Saigon, Viet Nam. But more importantly, I'm referring to how one lives between the indoors and the outdoors. In the cities of Viet Nam, so much of domestic life is enacted on the streets and in public space, underscoring an important cultural difference. There are a million small businesses lining the sidewalks—most of them are food stands that are run by a small family and offer one specialty dish. To eat a whole meal including dessert, you might visit two or three sidewalk stands in a neighborhood. It creates incredibly vibrant urban spaces and communities.
Eric and I share this obsession to organize space around experiences that oscillate between different micro-climates and to rethink buildings as an armature to reframe “nature.” In Viet Nam, nature and vegetation are abundant. Visiting a rural home or restaurant always includes eating the seasonal fruit and vegetables from their garden, a huge source of pride and hospitality. Growing up with a large Vietnamese diaspora, so many of our meals were communal and sourced from several households. I think about this a lot in our work—what do or can we share and how can daily rituals help to bring families, neighbors, constituents together? How can architecture be the catalyst for social and serendipitous interaction? Despite all of its challenges, New York is an amazing place to practice architecture in service to the most beautifully and challengingly diverse communities.
You studied architecture first at MIT and then at Harvard. How did you choose these two schools, and what were you hoping to get out of your time at each?
I didn’t choose MIT—my father suggested that I apply. Being the good immigrant daughter that I am, I honored his request and was utterly shocked to be admitted. Having grown up in white American suburbia, my second shock arrived as I registered the roughly one out of three AAPI student demographic on campus. That was incredibly empowering for me. At the time, MIT’s undergraduate architecture program emphasized tectonics, material and building crafts, history, and a humanist approach influenced by phenomenology. More importantly, our studios were housed in either the main building before its renovation or in a now demolished building— a humble warehouse where we had endless space and complete freedom to build big models, installations, and generally make a mess under the radar. We felt as if the school “belonged to us,” the students.
For graduate school, I felt that I needed to balance my undergraduate experience with an emphasis on linking concepts, form, and theory. I applied to Harvard and Columbia and was only accepted into Harvard, so my decision was made for me! My M. Arch 1 cohort, entering in 1994, was super proud to be predominantly female, for the first time in the GSD’s history. I wouldn’t say that I had concrete goals for my time in either school, as I was just trying to survive both extremely challenging programs. In hindsight, I value the freedom that I was given at MIT and the rigorous process of inquiry underpinning our coursework at the GSD. I carry both lessons with me in my practice and in how I teach.
“We’re working on improving how we live, where we work, and who has access to meaningful public and civic spaces. When we think about those goals, we are most interested in giving our end-users the agency to appropriate space as they see fit, to make it theirs.”
Tell me now about nARCHITECTS—why you started it with Eric, how it has evolved over the years. What are you focused on these days?
I met Eric at the GSD, fell in love, and soon after decided to get married and move to NYC—the middle ground between our hometowns of Chicago and Montreal. Then we decided to start a firm together. However, in NYC we found ourselves without a support network, partly because our professors and mentors were all based in the Boston area, and also because we did not stay in our “day jobs” long enough to build up a professional network.
Due to the lack of vacant land in NYC, the typical first projects are kitchen and bathroom or retail space renovations. We simply and naively imagined an architecture that maximized social interactions and invited appropriation by its users and mis-users. And so we gravitated towards competitions that allowed us to question learned assumptions about typology and program by the re-thinking of known building types—the theater, the museum, and housing. These early explorations led to temporary installations at cultural venues—PS1, Artists Space and the Cooper Hewitt Museum—which we approached as “almost buildings.” Eventually, we got our first ground up multi-family housing project, the Switch Building.
In many ways, today we are pursuing the same goals, albeit with more specificity regarding the pluralistic socio-economic, racial, ethnic communities that we serve, as well as more complexity in terms of sustainability, life cycle, and technical considerations and the competing public-private agendas of our client bodies. What am I focused on now? Architecture and nature, affordable housing, and more educational work. We’re designing a nature center in upstate New York and an M+O facility for NYC Parks in the Bronx, we’re working on an NYC HPD housing site for seniors, and we’re finishing up a project for Cornell and seeking similar projects.
Looking back at your career overall, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
Getting projects and receiving fair compensation for our services. We are still figuring it out! Maintaining design intent from start to finish is also always a challenge, particularly on public projects contracted to the lowest bidder. During every construction phase, there are a myriad of issues that could potentially undermine quality or our design intent. We try to be as flexible as possible and creatively re-think details, sequence, or systems to troubleshoot the issue. Often the solution is more cost effective and better than the original, so we try to see them as natural evolutions rather than changes for the worse.
Then there are the projects that have been cancelled after an advanced stage in design. Of course, it’s painful. Eric and I have a red sketch book that we share—a repository of sorts for future ideas. When something is cancelled, we joke, “Put it in the red book!”, which is our code for reincarnating similar ideas in a different way on a future project. We have to keep trying.
NYS Equal Rights Heritage Center. Photography by Iwan Baan.
Northwest Resiliency Park Pavilion. Photography by Michael Moran.
What have you also learned in the last six months?
How to listen better. Still working on it.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I admire many writers, for their ability to grapple with enormous societal issues, incorporate complex historical and contemporary narratives, and eloquently give voice to them. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer changed my life. I had never before read anything that remotely resonated with my childhood and identity. But finally in 2015, I connected my experience as a Vietnamese refugee growing up in America with the book’s re-traumatizing, fictional account of the same story.
My benchmark for writing about cities and neighborhoods is Sharifa Rhodes-Pitt’s Harlem is Nowhere. It’s one of our inspirations for our recent book, Buildings and Almost Buildings, in which Eric and I wrestled with how two people could write a book together. Mira Jacob blows me away—a graphic memoir written and drawn by her, Good Talk, takes you through questions of race in a bi-racial family against the backdrop of the city that I love. Most recently, I’ve been carrying the voice of Carlotta, from James Hanaham’s Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, in my head. Carlotta is a trans person previously convicted of a crime, who returns from prison after twenty years to an unrecognizably gentrified Fort Greene. Reading and being inside other people’s heads is a refuge for me and helps me make sense of a world in flux. I think architects need to exercise radical empathy and sensitivity for others to create spaces that resonate with the heterogeneity of its end users.
I am also lucky to teach at GSAPP, where I am galvanized every day by my colleagues who lead incredible practices, teach, write, research, mentor and advocate with their unique and strong voices and in addition to raising their families. Hilary, Amale, Karla, Nahyun, Leslie, Ada, Nina, Tatiana, Jing, Mary, Mabel, Galia, Laurie, Laura and many others have inspired me for years.
“Eric and I have a red sketch book that we share—a repository of sorts for future ideas. When something is cancelled, we joke, ‘Put it in the red book!’, which is our code for reincarnating similar ideas in a different way on a future project. We have to keep trying.”
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 want to work towards the public good, to help us live better together. After twenty five years of practice, I’m super proud that our work is connected to broader city or state initiatives: the AdAPT NYC competition that addressed the housing crisis and demographic shift towards small households for which we built Carmel Place; the Made in NY initiative, which supports local light manufacturing jobs and small businesses for which we’re renovating Bush Terminal; and New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act under which we built the net zero Jones Beach Energy & Nature Center. In other words, we’re working on improving how we live, where we work, and who has access to meaningful public and civic spaces.
When we think about those goals, we are most interested in giving our end-users the agency to appropriate space as they see fit, to make it theirs. I love hearing from non-architects the most, to understand how they connect to their built environment. When one of our clients for the A/D/O Design Center excitedly conveyed that she “got” what we were trying to do with the Periscope—a large mirrored skylight that combined reflections of Brooklyn and Manhattan into one image—obsessively taking daily photos of the changing light and views reflecting down into the space, along with the 200 annual public events, I was over the moon.
I have also been teaching for over twenty years, mainly at Columbia and Yale Universities. It’s a privileged relationship that is akin to creating the best kind of “third space.” My relationship with my students sometimes lasts for years after they’ve graduated, as former students become TAs, or academic or professional colleagues. I may hear from them years after our studio, with updates on their careers and affirmations of their ideas or our conversations that they still carry with them. Knowing that I helped them at some point in their trajectory and growing that relationship alongside the development of their careers—those are true rewards.
Jones Beach Energy & Nature Center. Photography by Michael Moran.
Carmel Place. Photography by Iwan Baan.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Advice is so relative to the person, their interests, strengths and weaknesses and what they need or are seeking. I wouldn’t presume to give one size fits all advice. However, from my experience teaching, I will say that I often see that my female students lack confidence, even though they are just as intelligent, driven, and talented as the male students. I try to work on that with them.