This month, coinciding with Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, a team of design leaders joined forces to launch A Rising Tide, a “new initiative to cultivate leadership and increase visibility of Asian and Pacific Islanders working in the built environment.”
The founding team includes a coalition of architecture and design leaders, including Billie Tsien, AIA, co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects; Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, co-founders of Neri & Hu; Ming Thompson, AIA, and Christina Cho Yoo, AIA, co-founders of Atelier Cho Thompson; Megumi Aihara, co-founder of Spiegel Aihara Workshop; Andy Rah, AIA, associate principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and Catherine Huang and Brian Yang, principals at BIG.
While the website and API Design Directory are now live, A Rising Tide programming will begin in Fall 2022. ARCHITECT caught up with three of the founders—Ming Thompson, Christina Cho Yoo, and Megumi Aihara—to discuss ART’s origin story, the API data gap, cultivating API leadership in the field, creating an API design network, a potential Asian Pacific American Museum, and how they hope to shape the industry in the years to come.
ARCHITECT: What was the spark to start A Rising Tide? Why this project and why this moment?
Cho Yoo: Ming and I grew up in the South, where we were often the only Asian people in various situations. We got used to simply working hard alone to achieve our goals as it was more about assimilation to succeed in our generation. However, an inflection point for me was the 2021 Atlanta shootings, a very emotional moment for many API women in particular. For the first time, I felt an emotional tugging in my heart to come together as an API community to combat injustices and to help each other rise. I’ve been inspired by the strides made in the film and tech industry as the community has worked together
Churchill popularized the saying that history is written by the victors. As I’ve learned in the past several years, there are so many lesser-known stories about APIs and how they’ve shaped the built environment. For example, San Francisco’s Japantown exists because of a covenant made to the Japanese community post-internment. Now that the covenant has expired, that neighborhood is at risk of losing its cultural character once real estate may be left to market forces. In the early 1900s, Koreans were lured to plantations under the pretense of a good new life in the Yucatan only to become slave laborers. We want to make more of these stories known especially as they have definitively shaped our built environment. We want to be a group that brings visibility to the great work being done by APIs in our industry but also makes known such under-broadcasted histories.
Ming: Most of the founding team for ART split their time between practice and teaching, and by working with students we’re seeing a strong need for these conversations. I started as a critic at the Yale School of Architecture this semester, and before I started I spent some time reading the Yale Visibility Project from 2020, a student-led project to look at issues of diversity at the school. The report showed that students of color were less likely to get teaching assistantships, be nominated for prizes, and be recognized as leaders in myriad ways; API students shared stories of being spoken over, confused for other API students, or having their names mispronounced. All of this has happened to me in school and at work, and I had never spoken up. API activism is on the rise, and young designers are asking for change. As our generation rises up in the design professions, we have an obligation to reshape design practice for the better.
The founding team for ART has nine members. How did you come together?
Thompson: On job sites and in design meetings, I am almost always the only Asian person in the room. Over the past few years, with rising violence against API people in the U.S., I finally started to think more about my own identity and activism. Over a quarter of API people have experienced a hate incident like being physically or verbally harassed, and I realized it was time for me to find a way to do better, to stand up with other API folks to make change in the world we know best, which is the design community.
Cho Yoo: Ming and I went to school with many of the people in the founding team, so we have long witnessed their ascent into leadership or firm ownership. I worked at Neri & Hu in the mid 2000s, and I’ve since considered Rossana [Hu] and Lyndon [Neri] mentors of mine. I specifically wanted to work at their firm because their work was so poetic and inspirational, but their holistic approach to design from branding, product design, interiors, and architecture was unique—unique enough that I wanted to trek across the world, to a country where I did not speak the language, just to learn from them. I worked at Arup where we did the engineering on Billie Tsien, AIA,’s East Asian Library at [University of California] Berkeley. Since then, I have been in love with her work and approach, so much that I attribute a visit to her [New York] American Folk Art Museum as being one of the reasons I changed my career to architecture!
I’ve heard API leaders advise younger APIs that they need to be more outspokenly confident—citing the TED talk about the “power pose”—to talk over people from time to time, and even to not be afraid to be a little crass in meetings to shake things up and get taken seriously. Billie debunks all that: she speaks slowly and thoughtfully; is humble; actively listens to others; and is introspective and insightful, yet she is also one of the world’s most renowned architects. We reached out to her not only because Ming and I have been deeply influenced by her in our own career trajectories, but she is a living example that authenticity, talent, quiet confidence, and integrity can pay off. Her example is so important in a world that may believe that APIs usually are just the quiet, underrated worker bees.
Most of the founding team members are educators, so we all have a heart for future generations as well. We’ve all taught in schools where the majority of students are API but a disproportionately small number of them emerge as leaders or win awards.
ART cites one of its reasons for starting as “Asians and Pacific Islanders are missing from leadership” even though “Asians and Pacific Islanders are entering the design professions in ever-increasing numbers,” citing an analysis by the Harvard Business Review that outlines how “Asian men are lumped into a 'non-underrepresented' category with white men; Asian women are assigned to a category that includes women of all races. In contrast, the report addresses Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans as distinct categories.” What is happening here with the exclusion of Asians and Pacific Islanders? How will ART address this issue?
Thompson: We’ve been part of conversations about women in architecture for a long time, including the Equity by Design efforts out of AIA San Francisco. The demographic patterns facing API designers are similar to those facing women: in school and at entry level jobs, large numbers of API people are entering architecture, but few of them are making it to the highest levels of the profession.
For the founding team, we looked around us and saw staggering data points. I teach a course with all first-year students at Yale, and 40% of my students identify as API; at the same time, I can count the API firm leaders in our home state of Connecticut on less than 10 fingers. At a large multinational firm, 40% of staff are API, and less than 10% of principals are API. What’s happening here to limit the growth of API designers?
One challenge we face is there is no available large-scale data on the number of API design leaders available. I actually write to the AIA every year and ask for this information: How many architecture firms in the U.S. are owned by women?; How many are owned by people of color?; How many are owned by women of color? There is no data available, which surprises me. I strongly believe we need data points like this to understand and improve our professions, and I’ll keep advocating for it.
ART states a mission of showcasing, elevating, and connecting API designers. How will ART do this?
Thompson: In our first year, we are focusing on showcasing, elevating, and connecting API designers.
We’re showcasing API designers through a first-of-its kind API Design Directory. We wanted to create an easy tool for clients, collaborators, and media groups interested in working with API designers, and we hope the resource will create new opportunities for those designers.
We’re elevating API designers with a features series that spotlights API firms, projects, and design issues. We’re launching this on Instagram and our website later in June, and we’re aiming to promote API design to a wide audience.
We’re connecting API designers through a series of workshops and online panel discussions with simultaneous in-person local gatherings across the country. We’re targeting three workshops: the first focused on broad API design issues; the second on the API leadership barrier with experts from business and academics; and the third on a potential vision for a national API museum, an idea gaining traction across the country.
In the long run, we have a whole host of ideas we’re pursuing, from kid-focused programming on topics of API design and history to the design of a metaverse project to design competitions.
ART is currently in “researching and learning mode.” What are you researching?
Thompson: The key question for me is what type of programs does our API design community need? Our founding team has a lot of ideas, but since we launched we’ve been contacted by many designers and students sharing their excitement about the project and their vision for what we need to learn about. For example, a young Asian American principal from a large firm reached out, and said how he wished this initiative could have existed sooner to help him navigate the complexities of rising through the firm and being the only API partner. A young woman reached out and said that she sees a lot of junior designers that are API, but no principals and few role models to look up to. We’re in conversation with them and others about programming that can join our community together in conversation around these issues.
Aihara: Landscape architects by nature look back at the relationships between place and history, at scales large and small. There is so much to learn about ourselves—our resilience and adaptability. I’m just now learning about our local San Francisco Japantown, where my mother lives. There is such layered complexity in the history of that small part of town that touches on Japanese internment, lands taken by eminent domain, and woefully lacking reparation. Even in a progressive city like San Francisco, city officials were recently criticized for trying to take more land away from Japantown and this marginalized community because many no longer remember these past stories.
I think ART can also become a repository for immigrant stories across the U.S. as a reminder to never take things for granted.
Cho Yoo: Thanks to the bill that U.S. Representative Grace Meng wrote, which recently passed in the House, I’m so excited about the prospect of an Asian Pacific American Museum. I’d love for our group to help research and conceptualize how the physical museum itself might best be designed to reflect our cultures and histories.
A year from now, what do you hope ART has accomplished? How about five years from now?
Cho Yoo: We noticed that a consolidated list of API firms didn’t exist so we created a directory. More and more, Ming and I have been asked for recommendations to other API firms. People are making value-driven decisions more so than ever.
Aside from what we already mentioned regarding putting on topical panel discussions (in different geographical locations, part Zoom, part IRL), we would like to become the go-to entity whenever someone is looking to reach API designers of the built environment. We would like to be a force for advocacy and representation in our community, magnifying and elevating the image of API designers in the mainstream. We’d love to help shape what the future Asian Pacific American Museum might look like and contain. We’d like to help put out curriculum for schools that expands architectural education to include works by APIs and inspires children to become designers for the built environment. We are even talking about creating a metaverse of API-designed works and collaborating with companies to design collections exclusively by API designers.
