“Our greatest challenges are our greatest opportunity - to think about our discipline differently, to think about design as an inclusive form of inquiry and practice, to really challenge what we've inherited or assume are automatic to the practices of our discipline and education.”
J. Meejin Yoon, AIA FAAR, is the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University and cofounder of Höweler + Yoon, an award-winning design studio engaged in projects across the U.S. and around the world. An architect, designer, and educator, Yoon is committed to advancing pedagogy, research, and practice to expand new knowledge and imaginaries across fields and disciplines, and to bringing deep expertise to the urgent environmental and social challenges facing our cities and communities. At AAP, she is founding director of the Design Across Scales Lab, a creative think tank and platform for multi-scalar design research.
Yoon's own research examines intersections between architecture, urbanism, technology, and the public realm, and her professional projects and creative work include cultural buildings, public spaces, and memorials. Recently built projects include the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, Sky Courts Exhibition Hall in Chengdu, China, and the Collier Memorial and MIT Museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Yoon's work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally at venues such as at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, and the Venice Biennale, among others.
Yoon received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Before returning to Cornell in 2019, Yoon served as head of the Department of Architecture at MIT from 2014–2018, and as a faculty member for 17 years prior. In 2016, Yoon received the ACADIA Teaching Award of Excellence, and the Irwin Sizer Award for Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education in 2013. In 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In this episode, Meejin talks about her journey to becoming Dean at Cornell, why she always wanted to maintain a creative practice alongside teaching, and what qualities she thinks makes someone a good architecture professor. Meejin also talks about how making the architecture discipline more accessible will make it more impactful, and how our disciplines in the built environment have to step up at this moment to address climate change, justice and equity in ways we haven’t before.
“Making our discipline more accessible will be the way our discipline can have more impact. It cannot be a rarefied thing. It has to convey to broader audiences and be understood as not a luxury but essential to the future of the built environment, and to the public to engage in climate adaptation and sustainability.”
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