February 2016

“Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial” opens February 12

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

December 2015

Architectural Digest selects Tsao & McKown for the 2016 AD100

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.”

December 2015

“Favorite Hotels in the World”

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.

October 2015

New York Spaces names Tsao & McKown a Top 50 NYC Designer

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.”

August 2015

Calvin Tsao in Open City: Existential Urbanity

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.”

July 2015

Emerging Voices Open Studios

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.

May 2015

Calvin Tsao in The New Yorker

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.”

May 2015

Zack McKown in New York Magazine

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.”

May 2015

Zack McKown in the Wall Street Journal

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.

May 2015

Departures 2015 Design Council

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.”

January 2015

Curbed New York recognizes William Beaver House

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.

October 2014

Heart and Home: Rooms that Tell Stories profiles Calvin Tsao & Zack McKown

“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.