wHY's Culver City office, photo by Amanda Ortland © Archinect

A multi-perspective, collaborative approach is at the core of wHY's practice. Led by founder and creative director Kulapat Yantrasast and managing principal Misa Lund, the 30-person firm has worked with a broad range of top cultural and educational institutions across the globe, retailers, renowned artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Yoko Ono, and more.

As an interdisciplinary practice, what qualities does wHY seek in their most promising job candidates when it's time to hire new staff? Archinect founder Paul Petrunia recently visited Kulapat at wHY's L.A. office, where Kulapat talked about his firm's own approach to the hiring process — not to mention a vital lesson about teamwork that he learned from Tadao Ando while working as his close associate.

Paul Petrunia: You mentioned your office is around 15 people in L.A. and then in New York...?

Kulapat Yantrasast: Maybe 13, 14. So altogether 28. Normally around 30 people.

And then in Louisville, Kentucky...?

We used to have 2. Now we only have one pair of construction C.A.'s. 

How is the staff broken down? Besides architects, what are some of the other positions in the office?

We have Bob, who's head of objects. Then we have Gregory, who's heading our ideas workshop. We have four landscape architects — three now, but one is coming in. The rest are architects and designers. 

Among the architects, what's the breakdown in terms of experience?

I would say — including myself — maybe more than 15 years of experience. And we have, in the middle, between 6 and 10 years. And the rest is lower than that. 

What are the most in-demand positions at the office? And the hardest-to-fill positions when you're seeking new people to join the team?

In-demand positions...Wow. Tough question.

Does it change?

It changes. We try to not look for people when we need them because then it will feel like fulfilling a specific thing, like, for example, we're looking for someone who knows how to do CAD. We used to do that. And I think it's not the right way to hire. So we now try to hire before we need someone, so that we can create a real role. That's why we take some time to really think about who we want to hire. We want someone who is design-savvy, and understands not just architecture, but how music and fashion and branding and architecture and urban designs and social issues all go hand in hand.

We want someone who is design-savvy, and understands not just architecture, but how music and fashion and branding and architecture and urban designs and social issues all go hand in hand.

So, culturally aware

Yeah, that's a big part of it for me. And then someone that has a strong sense of social responsibility. Because, at the end of the day, we want to be able to answer why we do certain things. Not because we get hired to design a rich building. What can we do to react, to respond to some of the things we see everyday, whether they're political or social. How do we ground the world of culture into reality? Those are the two qualities that I look for, and everything else is trainable.

In a way, sometimes it's better to have someone who has less experience, but is willing to look at problems in a more complex way, rather than trying to solve a problem in the easiest way possible. Because then it becomes, from points A to B, very spread apart; while that might be efficient, it's not the type of solution that we look for. What we want is, “Can we go from A to B, but can we get to C and D too?

When you're looking to hire somebody, what is that process like? You surely receive a lot of applications, resumes, and portfolios. How do you select which ones stand out to you? 

To narrow it down, you really need to look at what you're given, which is mostly CVs and portfolios. So, for the portfolios, we are looking at, of course, the design. Is there a strong vision? Does that person have something to say? And of course whether their design skills say something different. And then presentation skills and the technical skills of being able to put something together. In that order. 

We want to try to make it not as formal as a job interview. So you can get to know somebody better. Talk about your interests and your life, and talk about why this is the office for you. There's a lot of really great people out there that might not fit in with this office.

So the interview process is an informal process, in general, where you get to know the person as a person first and then to understand if they're a good fit? 

Yeah, it also depends on the level. For entry-level, we tend to be more focused on the qualities.

For the positions that have a lot of room for training.

Exactly. So we think about that. And then we have to think about whether that person seems to match with the people we have in the office. If it's mid-level, for example, you're looking more at their lives — where they are in their career, where they are in their lives, their personal values. From the mid-level, we definitely look at communication and management skills. Somebody who could really represent a firm and be able to really engage clients on a deep level. Someone who doesn't just present the work, but is able to be a friend that a client can rely on. So that's a big part of it, too. It all comes down to personality as well as professional skills. 

A lot of firms devote the majority of their marketing and promotion to attract clients. Do you do anything to promote your practice in a way to attract new employees, new staff? 

We try to. Teaching is one way of doing that. We really encourage our staff to teach. Teaching full time would be difficult, but at least part-time — doing studio reviews, pin ups, that kind of stuff. We really encourage them to be part of an ongoing dialogue, as long as it doesn't compromise the work at the office. And we always try to participate in job fairs and things we get invited to. We go to Harvard GSD, we go to PennDesign, USC. So we try to go to places where we have alumni in our firm. There would be a connection back to the professors and the growing student population there.

What would you consider to be the biggest challenge working at wHY architecture? 

For the people who work in LA and New York, I think there's a certain amount of effort and frustration because we try to push people to work together across offices, communicating with people remotely. People move sometimes but not often, depending on deadlines and projects. For competitions, obviously we collaborate together remotely. In that case, I feel that some people are not used to that. You throw something like that to people and you see two reactions: They're either completely overwhelmed where they're like “No, I just want to sit at my desk and just do this. This is what I am meant to be. I want to do beautiful drawings. I don't want to have to talk to many people. I want to focus on finishing my work.” Then you see the opposite reaction of, “Oh I love this. I love brainstorming. I love helping this person...” 

So the challenge always is, how can you do both? Do the talk, but get the work done. Not just getting the work done without the input. Or just pure input, but no output. That's a balance that I find young people struggle with. I think young people, sometimes, are so used to getting a lot of input without digesting it. And so from the input to the output, that creative void in your head is not given enough space or enough time. So that's the one that I've felt is a little bit of a challenge. But I think that is the most exciting part about the kind of practice we do. Going back to the point A-and-B thing, it would be easy to just get a programmer and design a building. I mean, anyone can do that, but if you want to really be able to incorporate some other things along the way, you need to know how to do both.

What are the tools that you use when you facilitate collaboration remotely between the L.A. and New York offices?

We do a lot of conference calls. We encourage people to work across offices. But of course nothing beats sitting down together. I'll be the first to admit that we really need to improve collaboration across the two offices. I would like it to happen more often. And that has been our focus: How can we encourage that? 

Are there ever any red flags that pop up when you're talking to somebody that you're thinking about hiring, and then something comes up and it's immediately a “No”?

Not really. It's more like, “Oh, this is not a good match.”

Lack of passion is a big turnoff in the sense that someone doesn't have a passion for the work that they do, even though it implies skillfulness.

Sometimes firms say that if a candidate comes to a meeting knowing very little about the firm or if the cover letter is poorly written.... there are certain things like that will immediately turn off an employer. 

Oh yeah, those apply to me too. Lack of passion for me is a big turnoff in the sense that someone doesn't have a passion for the work that they do, even though it implies skillfulness. Normally the answer to someone doing that is because they get good grades in doing a certain kind of drawing because they think the professor will like it. That would be a red flag for me. 

Do the people you hire tend to come from the same schools? 

Funny you ask. We have a very high rate of immigrants here. In the LA office, maybe 60 percent. In New York, it's maybe 90. 

Wow. Why is that? 

I don't know. We just picked the best people we can find and they turned out to be immigrants. We're sponsoring a lot of work visas and green cards from Asia as well as a lot from Europe. 

So, probably not the same schools. 

Well here in this office, the most repeated is Berkeley. I don't know why *laughs*. In New York, the most repeated is Columbia. We hire people who may have friends or people they know there. 

So there must be a lot of diverse ways of thinking coming from people originating from all over the place.

Yeah, oh my God! Like to have a German and a Swiss and an English person working together. It's like night and day. And you don't want to put people in boxes and cliches, but you can't help being amazed at that because their schools really stress different things.

Well maybe that's why it's so important when you look for people that are creative thinkers and that they're able to solve problems in various ways, because of the different methodologies that are used.

It allows people to see who they are. People will sometimes say “Well, so-and-so is a better planner than me”, and it's either that you will try to learn to be better at planning or you just know that you're going to have to be good at something else. I was trained that way. I might be good at something, I might not be good at certain things. Tadao Ando told me that in your 20s or early 30s, you're trying to be good at everything, right? You're trying to improve this, you're trying to be good at planning, you're trying to be good at designing, you're trying to be good at drawing a complex structural section. 

It's the job for someone like me, who is a manager, to be able to put people in the right position so that their skills can be celebrated.

But when you're in your mid-to-late 30s, you have to start to realize that you will never be able to learn all that. So you need to start to collaborate with people who are better than you on certain things and be able to create something new out of it. For me, that was an important lesson that he said. It's the job for someone like me, who is a manager, to be able to put people in the right position so that their skills can be celebrated. It's rare to find someone who has well-balanced skills — good designer, good communicator, good at presentation...

Do you have an internship program? How many interns and when do you bring them on?

We do, yes. It depends. Right now, we have three. It depends because we have summer interns, and that's between 2 and 3. And we have long-term interns who like to take a year or two to return from Europe and Asia; right now, we have two long-term interns. So it depends on the timing and normally we just got solicited. With the summer interns, we don't put out an ad. People just heard about it and applied.

Last question: Does the office ever do activities outside the office together, as a way of team building? 

Yeah, we used to a lot more. We do typical things. To be honest, it's now less than what we used to do. We've been through so many deadlines and competitions and some people are just kind of exhausted. But we want to build it up. We used to go bowling. One of the things we normally do is, because we work with a lot of art-related things, we normally did behind-the-scene tours with our staff. So we go take them to museums and look behind the scenes at museums. We took them to the GCI — the Getty Conservation Institute — to talk to the scientists who are doing conservation on the Eames House. In New York, we're working at The Met now and have a behind-the-scenes tour to talk about what's going on. We also take people to art studios, like Jonas Wood, Mary Rutherford, and some of the friends and artists that we work with so that they can see how artists make their work, what kind of problems or tensions that they're facing in their work, and see a different perspective... We try to do things together that are cultural. 

Interested in joining wHY? Check out their Archinect profile to see if they have any current listings. To see more active listings from hundreds of firms, browse Archinect's Job Board.