From the article Brower Park Library reopens within the Brooklyn Children’s Museum:

The Brooklyn Public Library’s Brower Park branch has joined forces with another Crown Heights institution: the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. After facing a hefty price tag of $5.6 million to make necessary improvements at its existing building, the library instead moved to the ground floor of the museum.

“When Brooklyn Children’s Museum was founded in 1899, it was envisioned as a place where a public library would be an integral part of our campus. We are delighted to partner with the Brooklyn Public Library as we transform this century-old dream into a vibrant reality,” Stephanie Hill, president and CEO of the museum, said.

In its Friday Five column, Design Milk asks designers, artists, and creatives to discuss their five favorite things.

Read the article to discover Calvin Tsao’s thoughts on the suns’s dynamics, seeking clarity, and more.

Tsao & McKown Architects has been awarded the AIANY Medal of Honor. The Medal of Honor is the highest honor that the Chapter confers on an architect, or firm of architects, to recognize distinguished work and high professional standing.

Recent Medal of Honor winners include Kim Yao (2021), Snohetta (2020), Deborah Berke (2019), and Claire Weisz (2018).

Read more about the 2022 Honor Awards.

From the article in Wallpaper*:

New York’s latest high-end residential offering, the slender form of 7 West 57th Street right off the bustle of Fifth Avenue, has just revealed its interiors through a show apartment. The scheme is designed to perfection by architect Calvin Tsao of Brooklyn-based studio Tsao & McKown Architects – the brains also behind projects such as the Sangha residential development in Suzhou.

‘The integrity of construction at 7 West 57th Street is absolute and that has allowed us to shape spaces with the perfect proportions for living,’ says Calvin Tsao. ‘These are spaces that encourage you to move around, that can inspire conversation. We’ve anticipated needs with a layout that just works, with room for personal expression in [the residents’] art, their decor and their heirlooms. There’s a purity of aesthetic here.’

Each year, the AIANY | Center For Architecture hosts their Guess-A-Sketch benefit, a lively evening where architects, architecture enthusiasts, and young professionals gather for an architecture-themed, Pictionary-style tournament wherein Honoree Sketchers draw iconic buildings as competing teams guess to win the Guess-A-Sketch trophy.

Sketches drawn by the honorees are available for purchase during the event, with all proceeds going to support the Center for Architecture’s K-12 design education programming for schools, youth, and families.

Defending their 2021 title against teams from the Center for Architecture, Ennead, Gensler, Lutron, Silman, and STUDIOS Architecture, Team RAMSA prevailed as the 2022 Guess-A-Sketch champions.

The 2022 Honoree Sketchers were Alexandra Barker, Calvin Tsao, Matthew Bremer, and Tonja Adair, and the Master of Ceremonies was Jerome W. Haferd.

Tsao & McKown has completed the design of Hong Kong: Here and Beyond, the M+ Museum’s inaugural exhibit. The exhibit will be on display in the museum’s Main Hall Gallery from November 11, 2021 to November 26, 2022.

From Archello’s 25 best architecture firms in New York City | New York-based architecture and design studios: 25 practices building the world:

“New York City is defined by its energy — but also by its buildings…For this article, we highlighted just 25 firms creating new and exciting work out of New York offices. We selected powerhouse firms as well as smaller studios doing innovative work…firms that are influencing others, redefining the industry, and creating a legacy. These New York-based practices are helping to build the world, one project at a time. Together, these 25 firms are defining architecture in New York City and beyond.

Architects Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown founded Tsao & McKown Architects in 1985 in New York. The firm has worked on private residences, commercial complexes, museums, and urban plans. They have also worked on industrial design, creating furniture, bathtubs, and more. Tsao and McKown have been honored with many awards, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award.”

Wallpaper* and China’s Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Fund (CHSDF) present China By Design—a celebration of Chinese cultural heritage and the many global creatives who have been inspired by it.

Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown have been featured in The China List, Wallpaper* and CHSDF’s curated list of national and international designers who have been inspired by Chinese culture in application and expression; creatives who have successfully and originally reinterpreted the ancient culture for contemporary times, driving China’s creative industries forward and impacting creative communities around the world.

Calvin Tsao spoke at the Center for Architecture at a symposium that was held in conjunction with the Center’s exhibition, Paul Rudolph: The Hong Kong Journey. Convened by Barry Bergdoll and Seng Kuan, the symposium focused on the innovative design and architectural solutions implemented in present-day Hong Kong.

From the Center’s website: “The reordering of the globalized world and the emergence of a new generation of young talent in Hong Kong have contributed to a surge of creative energy in the region. On a local level, Hong Kong has seen a rise in public interest in architecture, land use, urban development, preservation, and ecology. Designers, architects, and planners are responding to Hong Kong’s new social and cultural contexts, which are vastly different from the conditions Rudolph faced over 30 years ago. The program will facilitate international dialogue between architects in Hong Kong and New York City, allowing both sides to be exposed to ideas and issues that may influence the way they design cities in the future.”

Calvin joined fellow speakers Mark Lee, Jing Liu, Esther Lorenz, James von Klemperer, David Erdman, Angela Pang, Billie Tsien, Tod Williams, Laurent Gutierrez, Doreen Heng Liu, Dorothy Tang, Sasia Sassen, and Joanne Chu.

In the Toronto Star’s article Chinese planned community welcomes a diverse population traveling through life and learning, Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown were interviewed about the origins, purposes, and experiential comforts of their Sangha community design.

When asked about Sangha’s origins, Calvin said “My partner, Zack, and I believe the most important thing about any design is to create a holistic environment for whomever is there. We did an urban mass plan for Singapore and later one for Berlin — both with a private and public component to them. That’s when we realized the private sector and the government have to blend their agenda to make a proper society.

Being a Chinese-American, I’ve been observing China for a long time. It’s evolved from a very backward place to a superior country both politically and economically. We started investigating how to create a sustainable, vibrant, culturally-rich, socially-healthy community in the rapidly-growing, rapidly-urbanizing, economically-turbulent, politically-complex culture that is China.”

On March 20, Zack McKown participated in Interior Design’s Health and Wellness Roundtable, an industry-focused discussion exploring the ways in which wellness has become an indispensable design paradigm in the contemporary architecture and design scene.

The Urban Design Forum announces Calvin Tsao & Zack McKown as part of the 2016 Class of Fellows, a group of civic leaders shaping “dynamic, equitable and resilient cities around the world.”

The Integral Conversation provides an independent platform for experts from diverse fields to bring together their insights and perspectives on a range of topics related to sustainability.

Calvin Tsao joined Li Chung Pei (Partner at Pei Partnership Architects as well as son of I.M. Pei), Jianfei Zhu (Associate Professor of Architecture, Building, and Planning at the University of Melbourne), and Clifford Pearson (Director of the American Academy of China) to discuss I.M. Pei’s impact on a young generation of Chinese-born architects dedicated to sustainable urban design.

“Renowned architects and urban planners will discuss how architecture, through I.M. Pei’s works, transcends cultural and time boundaries and helps integrate human beings into nature in a harmonious way. We will also explore new concepts of living which emphasize the formation of self-sustaining, culturally-rich and human-centered communities.”

The Storefront for Art and Architecture invited Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown as part of a select group of architects, curators, historians, and critics, to write a letter to a New York City developer of their choice – one who they believe should be recognized for making a positive contribution to public life, and whose work should become part of the norm of how development occurs.

Calvin and Zack wrote a letter to the 14+ Foundation, which has collaborated with New York architects to build the Chipakata Children’s Academy and the Mwabwindo School in rural Zambia, to express admiration of their mission to bring vital communal and educational spaces to people and regions in need.

Read our letter to the 14+ Foundation here.

We completed the exhibition design for Beauty, the fifth installment of the Cooper Hewitt, The Smithsonian National Design Museum’s contemporary design exhibition series. The exhibition runs February 12 through August 21, 2016.

“Featuring recent work from the most outstanding voices in the global design scene, ‘Beauty’ will expand the discourse around the transformative power of aesthetic innovation,” said Caroline Baumann, director of the museum. “The exhibition will celebrate design as a creative endeavor that engages the mind, body and senses with works of astonishing form and surprising function.”

Project: Beauty – Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

Architectural Digest’s AD100 is a list of “the world’s best architects and designers who are shaping the way we live.”

From our profile in this year’s issue: “Partners Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown have adapted their sensuous vision of modernism to projects of vastly different types and scales, always with an emphasis on materials’ emotional as well as aesthetic qualities.”

Condé Nast Traveler names the Wheatleigh Hotel one of its “Favorite Hotels in the World.”

In our renovation of this historic family estate, we created a broad set of visual cues, imagining that the house had remained in the continuous ownership of one family with each succeeding generation contributing to its décor. Interiors are at once diverse and luxurious, historically evocative and comfortably familial. The result is a thoroughly modern and luxurious interpretation of Gilded Age grandeur in the Berkshires.

From the article: “The two have a distinctive way of thinking that attracts a remarkable array of clients with an astonishing range of projects: from private residential spaces stateside to countries like China, for which the architects have planned eco-friendly communities.”

Open City: Existential Urbanity is an anthology of architecture created by the students of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in studios conducted by the architect Diane Lewis with a team of colleagues from 2001-2014. Calvin Tsao taught a studio with Diane Lewis on the principles derived from the work of artist Lucio Fontana.

In his essay for the anthology titled, “Art/Architecture: Invitation & Intention,” Tsao writes:

“Limits, self-imposed, situation-based, or contextual, focused the critical process of the studio. Principles and limits, individual or collective, provide constraints. This concept is liberating, embodied in Fontana’s definitive punctures and piercings of the canvas…That move – the cut – is an example of how restraining conditions within an art can hone a work. The constraint versus the possibility is open; constraints expose opportunity. If the constraint generates the possibility, one must discover how to define it and how to reveal it.”

Tsao & McKown opened its offices on July 11 as part of The Architectural League of New York and Open House‘s open studios, which celebrate the release of an unprecedented publication on the 30th anniversary of the League’s Emerging Voices Program. With many of our fellow Emerging Voices in New York City, we invite you to visit our offices! 

More information here.

The New Yorker’s Culture Desk features the final presentations of Kevin Waltz and Alex Schweder’s interior design studio Housing the Homeless in NYC (taught jointly at Parsons The New School for Design and the Pratt Institute). Calvin Tsao, Cindy Allen, and Susan Sarandon served as guest critics.

“The class comes at a grim juncture in the history of New York City housing and its fraught relationship with homelessness. The number of homeless people in the city is the highest it’s even been – in March, the Coalition for the Homeless, a leading advocacy organization, placed the number of people living in shelters at just above sixty thousand, including almost twenty-five thousand children.”

Zack McKown chose Paul Rudolph’s living room for “18 Architects and Designers on Their Favorite Rooms of All Time.” 

“Rudolph is often described as Brutalist, but there’s nothing severe or somber about the space. The thrusting I-beams, canopied walkways, and floating stairs create these beautiful social and living areas. And though the design looks so new, it really fits into the older building.”

In the Wall Street Journal‘s “The Complete A-Z Guide to Tiles,” Zack McKown pairs tiles to illustrate how design can embrace narratives found in nature.

Here, we show an exterior detail from the Piedmont House.

Tsao & McKown is in Departures’ 2015 Design Council.

“The firm believes that the design process must begin with a holistic focus on the environmental, psychological, historical and economic aspects of a particular set of lives.”

Curbed names the William Beaver House seventh in 14 Most Popular Buildings of 2014, a ranking of residential projects in New York City “with the most overall units sold.”

In addition to the distinctiveness, sensitivity, and quality of design, the success of the building results from Tsao & McKown’s in-depth market analysis and branding services provided at the early stages of the project’s conception.

For more on the William Beaver House, click here.

“All of our belongings engage us in some form of interchange,” says McKown. “They’re there for the sake of contemplation.”

More on Heart & Home here.

An article on the Interior Design Magazine website documents Tsao & McKown’s Re[Framing] Provincetown installation as a way to “spark a conversation about the area and what once existed there.”

We are proud to announce the opening of Re[Framing] Provincetown: Animating History Through Sharing, an installation and following exhibition (September 26th – October 26th), which creates links between The Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) and the Provincetown community, to share in the history, perspective and perception of the town.

A series of diptych ‘frames’ are positioned in strategic locations throughout Provincetown, allowing visitors to engage in the present view, whilst identifying changes from a historical photo or painting of the same view, present in the second frame.

The installation will be on view until the end of October. Please click here for further information.

The New York Times calls Tsao & McKown’s Mel Bochner: Strong Language exhibition design “elegantly produced” in their review. On show until September 21st the exhibition exposes “the secret power of synonyms” drawing upon Mel Bochner’s past and present work with words.

The exhibition was a highly collaborative effort between the architects, the curator Norman Kleeblatt from The Jewish Museum, and Mel Bochner himself. After viewing the completed installation for the first time, Mr. Bochner wrote the following:

“It’s beautiful. Subtle, but powerful. Architecture-as-spatial-choreography.”

Tsao & McKown are the exhibition designers for the current Mel Bochner: Strong Language exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York. The artist Mel Bochner was also featured on the April cover of Art in America.

Mel Bochner: Strong Language
The Jewish Museum, New York
May 2nd – September 21st 2014

New York Times Review

Piedmont House is featured in Remodelista’s Chinese New Year Issue. The article, Common Ground: A Chinese-Style Family Compound in California, details the multi-cultural sensibilities of the house.

Remodelista Article

Sagaponac House was included in the Ten Top Images on Archinect’s “Architect Sure!” Pinterest Board!

Archinect Feature

Pinterest Feature

Tsao & McKown have been featured as Archinect’s Employer of the Day! Please follow the links to see the full Facebook feature or view our profile on the Archinect website.

EOTD Facebook Feature

Tsao & McKown Archinect Profile

Tsao & McKown are featured in The Wall Street Journal online and in print on Saturday 12th of October. The article written by Karen Stein references the office’s past experience designing in China and addresses design methodologies for the future.

Read the full article here

The Lumiere project in Taipei wins the Best of Year Award in the Residential Public Space Model category.

Merit was also awarded to Gary Morgenroth and Tsao & McKown for the Beresford Residence in the large apartment category.

Tsao & McKown Has Been Featured in the National Design Awards Gallery. The NDA celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seek to increase awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement in American design. Explore the work of the winners, finalists, and jurors of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards in the gallery.

Calvin Tsao to receive the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) Legacy Award.

MOCA: With this years celebration we seek to honor game changers, those who have made a difference by challenging stereotypes and exceeding expectations across a variety of fields.

We are honored to announce that Calvin Tsao has received the Legacy Award from the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). Congratulations to the fellow awardees: Silas Chou (President and CEO, Novel Holdings Group), Angelica Cheung (Editor in Chief, Vogue China), and Humberto Leon and Carol Lim (Co-Founders, Opening Ceremony).

The annual Legacy Award gala will take place at Cipriani Wall Street on December 3, 2012.

The recently completed Lumiere building in Taipei, Taiwan was featured in The Wall Street Journal’s Scene Asia. WSJ’s Deborah Kan discusses the $50 million listing with Andrew LaVallee.

Wall Street Journal Article and Slideshow

Video: $50 Million Dollar Home in Taipei

The William Beaver House in Manhattan’s financial district has received a Citation from the New York State AIA. In addition to this most recent recognition, the William Beaver House has been lauded for its architecture and interiors by other prestigious organizations, and has received extensive local and international coverage.

William Beaver House has been recognized by the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design ”in conjunction with the European Centre for Architecture and Design and Urban Studies” with a 2010 American Architecture Award for Most Significant Contemporary Architecture in the US.

WBH will be included in a special exhibition of all winners at their annual conference, "The City and The World: Madrid Symposium” before traveling to the Athens Museum and then Istanbul.

The First Lady hosted a ceremony at the White House for the winners and finalists of the 2009 National Design Awards, part of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She praised the recipients for their innovative ideas, and for serving as inspiration for future generations of designers. July 24, 2009.

Video: The First Lady addresses the NDA Winners

Article on the Cooper-Hewitt Awards

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has selected Tsao & McKown for the 2009 National Design Award in Interior Design.

New York Times Article regarding the Awards