Michael K Chen at his studio in New York City. Photo: Max Burkhalter. All images courtesy of Michael K Chen Architecture.

Michael K Chen Architecture is a seven-piece, New York-based design practice whose exuberant sense of creativity playfully blends the boundaries between architecture, interior and product design while avoiding expected style labels.

But for Chen, as he tells us in our latest Studio Snapshot, his firm's dedication is about more than just well-designed client projects: as a co-founder of the nonprofit Design Advocates, he helped connect independent design teams with NYC public schools, small businesses, and organizations in underserved communities to facilitate pro-bono collaborations during the pandemic-induced economic downturn.

Can you tell us how Michael K. Chen Architecture was founded?

I had been really quite focused on teaching and academic work for several years, and only occasionally doing a small project here and there on my own. But in late 2011, I had an opportunity to be considered for quite a large project — a single-family house in Manhattan — and after I was selected for it, I was immediately aware that I would need to build a team. I was so lucky because I was surrounded by amazing people whom I had worked with previously, or who had been incredible former students.

The first several people I hired were all people I was already close to, so from the beginning, the practice was founded around mutual caring and respect; and also this interesting problem of how to adapt relationships, conversations, and working methods that were established in a research-heavy academic context into professional ones. We're still a group of people who care a lot about each other, and who are interested in finding opportunities to put theory and research directly into practice.

How many people are currently employed at MKCA? How is your office structured?

We are presently seven designers with other 'at-large' team members who sometimes come in to help us out on larger projects. For years, we were extremely flat organizationally, but we've recently created slightly more structure with two long-time team members elevated to Associates. So now each of them has a portfolio of projects that they are helping me to manage, and there are small teams that are working together on each individual project.

That said, from a design perspective, we're quite flat. We spend a lot of time sketching and sharing ideas, both within project teams and across the office. We will frequently show and tell and organize sessions where we all look at aspects of a project, draw, and talk about them. The structure is really there to make sure that the projects and clients are serviced well, and that the project teams are well organized.

Tell us more about your four-legged team members.

We're a multi-species office, and there have been four four-legged members of the team over the years. Two have since retired to puppy heaven. We now have Leroy, a Catahoula-Leopard mix, and Archie, a miniature dachshund. Leroy is the elder statesman and our director of security. He belongs to Natasha, one of our Associates. Archie has been a trainee since he was a puppy. He hasn't really been motivated to advance beyond that, even though he is now three years old — probably because his dads (my husband and me) spoil and indulge him. Before the pandemic, he would spend most of the day napping in various laps around the office. Now that we're all working from home, both he and Leroy make fairly regular appearances on Zoom conferences and spend a lot of time altering us to dangerous noises in the hallway during our meetings.

Would you like to scale up and grow your team? What do you consider the ideal size for your practice?

We are adding one or two people to the team over the next few months, at which point we'll be eight core team members. I've never really been interested in growing the team much beyond that. It's important to me that everyone in the office — myself included — has a great deal of agency in the individual projects, and we don't take work that we don't collectively agree is compelling.

We have very little turnover in the office and are really only as large as we need to be to do the best work we can. We tend to grow only when we feel that we have the work to sustain the team for a substantial period of time and to reserve a little capacity.

The first several people I hired were all people I was already close to, so from the beginning, the practice was founded around mutual caring and respect.

We are interested in maintaining the ability to pursue new and unfamiliar opportunities, and in bringing new perspectives into the office, and that frequently motivates our hiring. We're also extremely good at collaboration and view it as a central aspect of what we do. Over the years, we've built quite an extensive network of experts, partners, and collaborators whom we team up with to execute and pursue larger or more complex work.

I tend to resist the need to own or control every single aspect of the projects that we work on and am generally thrilled when we can be part of a diverse team. That's allowed us to learn a lot from what our consultants and collaborators have to teach us and to also focus our energies on what we do best.

What have been the biggest challenges starting and running your own practice?

A lot of designers will say that the financial and 'business' aspects are a challenge, but for me personally, it's all about people. It's about learning how to be a good manager, how to share, how to communicate, and how to listen. That goes for the team, and also for the clients, collaborators, contractors, and everyone involved in making a project.

Having a practice tends to bring out all of one's insecurities, and I think that leads to a lot of unproductive behavior. Being in touch with my own anxieties and limitations and knowing how to manage them is both incredibly challenging and has also been absolutely necessary for learning how to be a more confident and capable principal. We're all taught to think that as architects we are supposed to know and be able to do everything, but I really think that knowing yourself is the hardest and most important thing.

What challenges have you faced during the past pandemic months? Has remote work been a solution?

Here in New York, we watched the pandemic take hold in early March, and I made a decision relatively early to shift to a working-from-home model. As a team, I have to say that we were remarkably prepared for that. Our previous studio space was destroyed in a fire in 2017, and we had experienced a few weeks without power after Hurricane Sandy, so we were maybe a little too accustomed to being turned out of our space. Those experiences also taught us about the importance of cloud licenses, online backups, and all the digital infrastructure that we needed to have, so we were already set up in that regard as well.

We're a very close team, so the hardest thing has been to find ways to preserve the convivial atmosphere of the studio, but tools like Zoom, Slack, and especially Miro have been a lifesaver in that department. We're as productive as we've ever been, or maybe even a little more so as a result.

That said, the spring was definitely a challenge. Much of our work went on hold, and our revenues sort of fell through the floor. Fortunately, we received some relief through PPP and were able to avoid any cuts in the team or in anyone's compensation (except mine).

During that time, a few other friends and I, who are all principals of small firms, got together to share information and try to help each other, and those weekly calls became a full-fledged organization, Design Advocates, which we created as a nonprofit network of independent design studios who collaborate on pro-bono projects that serve organizations and small businesses in disadvantaged communities.

We're all taught to think that as architects we are supposed to know and be able to do everything, but I really think that knowing yourself is the hardest and most important thing.

Hundreds of firms and individual volunteers have contributed to D/A projects over the past 10 months, developing outdoor dining for neighborhood restaurants, reopening plans for several NYC public schools, COVID-safe workplaces and service spaces for human services agencies and nonprofits, a furniture system for a major provider of services to the homeless here in New York, and so on.

We're also collaborating with City agencies to create new programs and resources for underserved communities and are developing our own research and self-initiated projects and prototypes, in addition to working on new projects for organizations large and small.

We started this group in late March, and so we're coming up on the one-year mark and are looking at organizational structures and strategies to make sure that it will be both sustainable for the long term and also be able to return value to the member firms and volunteers who have been a part of this effort.

Design Advocates. Video produced by the AIA New York/Center for Architecture, courtesy of Design Advocates/Michael K Chen Architecture.

Describe your work. How do you define your own unique style and approach?

I certainly try to avoid any discernible visual or stylistic signatures, but I would say that all of our projects are characterized by a love of craft and making and that they tend to balance design rigor with a playful sensibility. We do a lot of residential work, and our projects frequently straddle the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, product design, and interior design. 

We’ve tried to build a practice where our ability to bring together many voices and facilitate and empower the work of others is truly central to the work. And interestingly enough, interiors have afforded the opportunity to pursue that objective in an incredibly satisfying way because there are so many individual design elements and potentials for collaboration, and because the standards for performance, quality, and detailing are so high. I find tracing a design agenda through many scales of a project to be incredibly satisfying.

Many of our projects tend to be situated within historic contexts or urban fabric, and connecting digital design thinking to artisan and craft processes is our way of thinking through the mediation between those historic contexts and contemporary life.

I've always been very inspired by the practice of Ray and Charles Eames, who wove together so many strands of disparate knowledge in each project, and other multi-hyphenate design figures like Gio Ponti, who worked across so many different scales and contexts. We certainly strive to do the same. We're extremely interested in synthesizing different bodies of information and expertise in our projects. The projects that I enjoy the most tend to emerge out of a kind of conceptual bricolage, where there are many intricate and overlaid agendas at work simultaneously.

For example, we created a vertical garden facade system for one of our projects with a team that included landscape architects, ceramic artisans, conservation botanists, engineers, and a lot of detailed environmental analysis that directly informed the geometry of cast terra cotta planter elements that are home to some endangered local fern species that are losing their habitat due to climate change. It's exciting to be able to think about how something highly local like a craft process could meaningfully impact a planetary phenomenon like the loss of biodiversity at the scale of a building.

Where do you see MKCA in 5 years?

We've been very fortunate in that the projects we have had tend to afford us the opportunities to invest in research and experimentation and to be thoughtful about our values and priorities. In the first five years of the practice, we were extremely focused on digital-to-material processes; the past four or five years have really been about building on the previous by situating the practice within a more expanded disciplinary field. I feel like the next four or five are about social value.

We are looking for ways to be smarter and more innovative about our supply chain, to help safeguard and support workers and eliminate exploitation, and to produce value and equity for more people, businesses, and communities than our work has in the past. 

Your Pied-à-mer project is a 600-sf apartment holiday home aboard the world's largest residential yacht. Can you tell us if and how your architectural approach towards a commission like this differed from conventional projects?

Designing a project on a large ship is unique on a lot of levels but also kind of the same. Suffice it to say, a moving vehicle is an extremely specific technical and political context, but so is a cooperative apartment building in Manhattan. I will say that one of the things that we are very sensitive to is how the interior environments we design respond to and change over the course of the day — how they are part of an intricate choreography of movement, use, and spatial ambience, and it was very interesting to think about what that means when the 'ground' is literally shifting under your feet constantly, and the space is never in the same place twice.

We're also collaborating with City agencies to create new programs and resources for underserved communities [...]

For us, that meant really pushing ideas that we've been developing about the design of compact spaces to greatly elongate the circulatory trajectories through the apartment. You move between and around these two prefabricated pod-like volumes that are situated in the space. Stretching and folding the circulation more than doubles the experienced length of the space, making it feel more expansive. We wanted there to be a degree of discovery, even within a compact interior. The interior surfaces are all designed to interact with light in different ways with varying sheen, texture, and color, with the intention of accentuating the constant subtle shifting of light and locale that one experiences as the ship circumnavigates the globe.

Do you have a favorite project? Completed or in progress.

Favorites are utterly impossible, but we're working on a couple of projects now that reflect where I hope the firm is headed in the near future. One of them is a house on a very rugged and sensitive watershed site. One of the things that we're doing there is exploring how to leverage a forestry practice where certain trees are culled for the health of local forests, and how to tap into that material resource to create a highly local supply chain for structural timber and cladding where none presently exists. We're right at the beginnings of that effort, which is part of a project with a strong restorative ecology agenda, and I'm excited to see where it will go.

If you could describe your work/practice in three words, what would they be?

Curious, collaborative, and considered