Beyond the Imagined: Karamuk Kuo's Jeannette Kuo on Space for Herself, Effective Mentorship, and Loving the Challenge

By Julia Gamolina

Jeannette Kuo is co-founding partner of KARAMUK KUO based in Zurich and Professor of Architecture and Construction at TU Munich. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from U.C. Berkeley, a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Master of Advanced Studies from ETH Zurich. She has taught at MIT, EPF Lausanne, and Harvard GSD. In 2023, she was the Cullinan Visiting Professor at Rice University. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Jeannette talks about her approach to design and her firm, advising those just starting their careers to embrace challenges.

JG: Now that we're a few months into 2025, what are your priorities and intentions for the rest of the year? What are you looking at that we should all be paying attention to as well?

JK: At the moment, we are focusing on the sustainable growth of our office, to ensure that we maintain and nurture the culture that defines who we are while embracing the diversity of backgrounds and experiences that comes with a growing team.

Our ambitions were never to be a large office but to be able to do meaningful work that motivates us everyday and to create an environment that we would enjoy working in. This drive means building a structure that allows for creativity and learning and recognizing that, with growth, our roles have switched from leading a team to mentoring and enabling those in our office to grow while understanding our core values.

International Sports Sciences Institute, Lausanne Switzerland. Photography by Laurian Ghinitoiu.

Now let's go back a little bit — tell me about why you studied architecture, and how you chose where you studied?

I grew up in Indonesia and as a kid there, back in the eighties, there wasn’t much to do so you invented things to fill the time: games, experiments, stories—things that often combined different skills and interests. In hindsight that boredom was great for creativity. Architecture appealed to me as it seemed to be the intersection of many fields. I loved that complexity – the fact that it is as much social and political as it is creative and technical.

I studied at UC Berkeley and at Harvard GSD. Both were schools of a certain scale where I could shape my own path and tap into other allied fields which was important for me. As an architecture student, I took landscape courses but also film studies and political economy that offered me other ways of seeing our built environment. At the GSD I also got obsessed with researching the relationship between structural engineering, urban design, and architectural space — something that still percolates in our work.

“The biggest challenge of all is being an effective mentor: learning to communicate hard truths with empathy and leading by example.”

— Jeannette Kuo

Tell me about your experiences working for various offices before starting your practice. What did you learn that you still apply today?

I worked in offices that were known at the time for their material research and constructional experiments: Barkow Leibinger, ELEMENTAL, and Architecture Research Office. These were offices that engaged with the reality of making where the translation of a concept into the built work was the space for experimentation. I learned to appreciate working across scales, to never trust a drawing, and to design through tolerances.

How did Karamuk Kuo come about? What are your priorities for it as we enter 2025?

You could say that our office came about with a certain pragmatism. We were life partners before we were office partners. When we both started going independent, it just made sense from many levels to work together—we were two people without any external responsibilities, with no ties to any one place. There was a freedom at that time to just put everything into what we loved doing. It was like working with your best friend and when you worked late you didn’t have to worry about your spouse complaining.

We also recognized the advantages and the complementary nature of our backgrounds and approaches. KARAMUK KUO developed from the way we challenged each other, pushed each other, and all while testing the robustness of an idea. This way of working is still central to our design methodology.

Rice University Cannady Hall – Extension to the School of Architecture, Houston TX. Photography by Laurian Ghinitoiu.

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

There are lots of challenges to running a practice that we were never taught in architecture school, from the business end of things to curating a company culture to the mental resilience of bouncing back from competition losses, all of which we had to learn on the job. The biggest challenge of all is being an effective mentor: learning to communicate hard truths with empathy and leading by example. The buck stops with us so we have to show up even if there are times when we don’t feel like it.

I think we were able to weather a lot because we were together. Very often a project setback or a competition loss would affect one of us more than the other — somehow not always the same person — and that lets us lift each other. Over the years we’ve also learned to live lighter, recognizing that when one door closes another opens. We’ve learned that setbacks can often be blessings in disguise. In many of our projects, the pushback from clients or the constraints from certain regulations or technical demands often became new opportunities. When we take them head-on, they often liberate us to rethink the norm. This attitude allows us to easily pivot and to stay light.

“Our core mission is to...align a way of living, a collective aspiration, with a set of spatial experiences.”

— Jeannette Kuo

What have you also learned in the last six months?

I’ve learned to carve out space for myself. The last fifteen years have been fun but intense. I’ve given a lot of myself to the office, to my students, to our profession to support design culture, often travelling intensely for all these commitments. As a harmony-seeker, I found it difficult to say no.

Last year though, I had a serious health scare. I’m okay now, knock on wood, but through that experience I finally learned to take time for myself. I learned that to be effective and to be creative, I needed that space to gain new perspective and that meant learning to say no to things that that I maybe too readily said yes to before; for example reviews or lecture invitations. Mainly it’s to strike a balance between my personal and professional life and still finding time for myself.

Who are you admiring now and why?

My father. He passed four years ago and in trying to keep the memory of him alive for my daughter, I’ve come to appreciate even more deeply how he had reinvented himself over the years. He had left school at fourteen to help provide for a large family and, with the fall of Saigon, was abruptly shut out of his homeland while working in Java.

From these very humble beginnings he was able to become a respected businessman running a large company, teaching himself English, French, and Indonesian with such fluency that people often thought he was a native speaker. I often wonder who he would have been had he been given the type of opportunities that I was afforded. The challenges that he faced makes ours seem anecdotal. But I think what stuck with me was his insatiable desire to learn, to constantly improve on himself.

House on a Slope, Zurich Switzerland. Photography by Rory Gardiner.

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’d love to think that our buildings help people to enjoy their days better; or even that they have positively changed the way the inhabitants interact. Most of our work involves designing the relationship between the individual and the collective. This can be seen in our institutional projects just as strongly as in our housing ones. These are spaces for the everyday but they are also spaces where rituals and celebrations take place, spaces that define the basis of our social structures.

Our core mission is to support and enhance these moments — to align a way of living, a collective aspiration, with a set of spatial experiences. This ambition should of course be achieved through holistic approaches that are resource-conscious and that allow for our buildings to be resilient over time. Success with this would mean that we are surprised by events and activities that take place in our spaces beyond what we had imagined — that our spaces have sparked uses that could only have been possible there but that evolve out of a reinterpretation of the space. We like to think of the users as engaging in an active relationship with the building, learning, appropriating, adapting.

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

The only thing you can fully control is your attitude. Learn to take the hard blows with lightness then fight back with your fiercest smile. During the pandemic I started listening to the podcast “How I Built This” and almost invariably all the successful entrepreneurs have encountered major setbacks along the way and it all came down to how they bounced back. You can say that they all loved the challenge, not just the goal.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.