On Collective Intelligence: Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake

Kieran and Timberlake are graduates of the Master of Architecture program and made a return to the faculty of University of Pennsylvania as Professors of Practice in spring 2026. They are responsible for the renovation and expansion of Stuart Weitzman Hall, the School’s first major capital project in 58 years, completed in October of 2025. Their Philadelphia firm, founded in 1984, “work[s] within a culture of continuous discovery, where architecture is not a fixed outcome but an evolving dialogue.”

Could you tell me a little about your backgrounds?

James: I was born in Ohio. My father was an Episcopalian minister. We moved to Michigan when I was four and a half. My dad was a graduate of Kenyan College. My mother had no formal university or college training, but she was very active in the arts and quite talented. She painted. She was involved in a variety of things as an Episcopalian minister’s wife, at the parish. So we were always around a lot of cultural influences, in terms of music and the arts. I declared when I was about five that I wanted to become an architect. My dad was a builder—he had added on to a parish in Ohio and then in Grand Haven, Michigan. So that became my pursuit. The trajectory led me to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I ended up meeting Steve.

Steve: I certainly had early childhood interests in art, although there weren’t any artists in my family. My dad was a car mechanic and then a salesman and, ultimately, a car dealer. But as a child, I had interests in art and my mom signed me up for lessons at an art center in the little northern New Jersey town I grew up in. But I began college thinking I was going to be an economics major. I decided about halfway through—after a summer job in Athens, Greece, in an industrial development bank—that no, I didn’t want to do that with my life. That summer I decided to become an architect, but it was too late to major. So I majored in the history of art and architecture and then went back to graduate school for architecture.

J: I have to say Steve’s economics interest and background certainly has been a benefit over the 50 years we have known each other. We all get here in a different way. The critical thing, I think, is what are you exposed to? Certainly, when our paths crossed at the University of Pennsylvania as graduate students, Steve and I found a common kind of language, if you will. When we both began, I think Steve and I were opposites in this regard: I was sort of a high intuiter and a low analyzer, and he was a high analyzer and a low intuiter. Over time, those have balanced out. Now, I think we both begin almost in the same way. But back in the day, I might have two or three or four ideas about how to begin something, whereas he was more deliberate—not reliant on—but certainly supported by more data and facts and the underlying context of a project. Ultimately, that’s how we grew a research-based practice. Those two personalities melded together, forming a singular bond.

How is your work responsive to the environments that you’re in?

S: We begin every project by doing a deep research dive into the circumstances of the design problem. That includes the people that we’re working with and making it for, the place it’s in, and a whole host of other considerations. This has led to something we call the research and environmental design exercise and report. At the outset of every project, we create a baseline to go off from: it identifies opportunities to explore in the design problem and some of the goals—be they environmental or otherwise. But that process also has to be combined with a healthy dose of intuition. That’s probably one of the few benefits of aging: the improvement of one’s intuition about the world. So long as you’re curious and open and observe and react and adjust as you go, you just become better about what design solutions and directions are going to bear fruit across the whole breadth of a project. I think ultimately, as James suggests, it’s the fusion of those two things—intuition and analysis—that is critical to the work.

How did your process work in Weitzman Hall—in a design created specifically for artists?

S: We’ve been fortunate to do a lot of work for artists. We did a large project at Washington University in St. Louis that James could talk about. The cultures of these artists are as diverse as the institutions we’re working with—they’re not at all monolithic. But one of the things that I think is relatively common to them is that artists want their workspaces to be more mute and less architecturally invasive. Their work is the foreground, and they need a background. But in Weitzman Hall, the real opportunity was that it isn’t just artists in the building. Lots of other people teach and work there. There are design studios that landscape architects and urban designers are using. There’s an energy research center, archives, a variety of teaching and gallery spaces that bring the whole of the school of design into the building. It’s a bit of a mixing bowl. And that was the big opportunity of the building—to integrate all the fine arts and design and planning arts together with research. And it works. Fritz Steiner said he’s met more fine arts students in the first five days the building was open than he had in the first five years.

J: One of the things that we experienced both as graduate students and at Penn in the old graduate school of fine arts—before Weitzman Hall—was the interdisciplinary mixture coming together and the exchange of ideas that you can get by being in the hallway with professors or other students. Both Steve and I are American Academy in Rome prize fellows: he was there in 1980-81, and I was there in 1982-83. We were more mature then, not students any longer, but during our separate research pursuits in Rome, we were running into classics majors and pre-doctoral folks in the classics and history, and also running into sculptors and painters and other architects and musicians and writers. When we talk about the mixture of the arts, we know that the whole notion of teaching these things in segregated environments is a bit problematic. So creating a community out of several disciplines was a goal. There’s a dichotomy that occurs in the building, because what architects need in terms of space, and what artists, painters, sculptors might need in terms of space are quite different. There’s a commonality in the sense of a shared environment and a common space that they can come to. Both Steve and I share the notion that the arts are best when those interdisciplinary opportunities come together.

You are both teachers. Could you talk about your own pedagogy and how you think current architecture students should be educated?

S: We’ve tried over the last 25 years to instill a research ethic into all of our teaching. We don’t just walk in and put a design problem on the table and spend the whole semester critiquing individual responses to the same problem. Instead, we have begun our studio teaching with research enterprises that aren’t unlike how we begin in the office. We try to situate the design problem more broadly, in terms of who it’s for, where it is, what the purposes and all the circumstances are—whether it’s in Bangladesh or in the projects we’re now doing all over different sectors of Philadelphia. Some of it is general research into design and some of it is program specific. I think that’s a difference in the way we teach compared to most. It’s been good for us. We think it’s been good for the students.

J: I think Steve outlined it well. And we are products of influences—not only our backgrounds—but our teachers and the architects that we mentored under—Bob Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steve Izenour, and John Rauch. And there were a number of professors that certainly influenced both of us at Penn. We try to impart to our students that architecture is the greatest sum of the parts that go into it. Students tend to kind of be very selective, very singular about what they want to be influenced by. We try to expand that, to broaden that series of influences so that they become more well-rounded and think more broadly and expansively about how they can make architecture richer for the participants that use it.

We have a saying around our office that collective intelligence is always better than singular intelligence. I think both Steve and I were influenced early on by seeing architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Philip Johnson on the covers of Time magazine, holding models of their buildings. We realized that there were thousands of people, thousands of influences that contributed to that singular outcome. That was not the way forward for us—we knew that the shared collective intelligence really needed to be celebrated.

S: Another thing that we certainly took from our own mentors was writing—doing the hard work to craft thinking into a coherent set of inquiries about architecture and planning. Certainly, the Venturis were prolific writers and we understood that to be part of the practice. They built things and then they reflected on what they’d done and shared it with the profession more broadly.

J: I’m glad you brought that up, Steve. Denise was more a writer, and Bob was more a thinker through pictures—even though Bob wrote and Denise drew. I think Steve was very much had an affinity for Denise’s writing. And I was drawn obviously to Bob and his ability to pictorialize things. It’s an important method, drawing. I mean, the tactility of that relationship—between your thought going through your hand down to the paper and what that looks like and how your brain is retranslating the material. It is just a really significant act of creation.

S: And that’s true of words, too. Every word that you put down and then responsively react to through editing: that is a very, very important critical act.

What do you value in the architects that come into your practice?

S: There are certain principles and ways of working and thinking through design problems that we value highly. This will sound pedestrian—but that’s what you’ve got to do first before you can get to great thoughts about things. We certainly look for work habits. People who take on problems systematically, know how to work around roadblocks, including just going home for the night, getting a glass of wine, thinking it through and coming back the next day. So we look for consistent work habits, and we look for curiosity and inquisitiveness. While they’re doing something, are other thoughts occurring to them? Are they expressing those—participating in the collective intelligence of the whole and going after it through curiosity? And, of course, skills: basic skills of design and conception and visual skills of proportion and recognition that one particular representation of a form is more compelling than another. I’m sure James has others.

J: Well, communication is huge. And we communicate in all forms. We’ve talked about words and pictures. A young architect needs to be able to do both and do both well. There are, obviously, people who do not have both skills in equipoise. And then we try to help, train them to become more balanced. But the ability to communicate is a critical aspect of it.

I was introduced to your amazing work on the American Embassy in London through the TV show The Diplomat. Would you speak to how you integrate the arts into your architecture (as you did in that building), or how you approach it when there’s an opportunity?

J: That’s been an evolving act on our parts, over time. And it’s been hard fought, for both Steve and me and the firm—because, obviously, we do work for clients. One of the great things about working for the Department of State overseas building operations is that there’s an adjunct organization called Art in Embassies, which is an independent group that works with the Department of State to ensure that American cultural influences are displayed in the work abroad. And vice versa—that foreign artists and cultural significant others from other countries are brought into the work. In the case of London, if you ever walk around the building, one of the things that will strike you is that it feels like an art museum: there’s art on the walls everywhere.

S: More broadly, that project was a deep integration of urban design and planning, landscape design, structural design, and mechanical design. We’re very proud of the fact that it is a LEED Platinum building. No one was thinking you could do that with an embassy, given the requirements and energy demands, but it attained the highest levels of environmental rating in both the UK system (BREEAM) and the American system of LEED. And we did that through integration. We worked on the urban plan of it—it generated the development of a whole district around it, the Nine Elms area, Wandsworth Borough. And the Olin Studio, Laurie Olin’s landscape firm, was integral from the outset. After some of the attacks in the 1980s and 90s, embassies around the world had become basically bunkers. This one is the opposite of that: it opens itself out to the world. It’s glass, it’s prismatic, it reflects light in different ways across the day. It’s everything embassies weren’t until that time. It came about through close integration with urbanists, landscape designers, brilliant structural engineers. Everybody harnessed all their energy to get to a building of that aesthetic and performative output. It was a remarkable project for us, capped off by the opportunity to work with some of the greatest artists in the world. You know, Mark Bradford’s mural is unbelievable: We the People. And Rachel Whiteread’s work. I think we made the most of it. I think we both feel that that building is one of the loves of our lives.

Is there anything else you would like to offer?

S: Being at Penn as students was a generative experience for us both that I think grounded us solidly, experientially. Above all else, it connected us with some of the real leaders of all the professions we would wind up working with over time. Over the years, we’ve taught at a whole host of places, but the majority of our time has been at Penn. And we’re grateful for the opportunity to remain young by teaching and working with students. Mostly, it comes down to the people that you meet at the end of the day and get to know. Getting to know the Venturis through working part-time in their office while we were grad students was an unbelievable way to begin—with some of the most inspiring professionals in the world.

J: I echo that. Relationships are everything. And those relationships extend to institutions, not just people. Penn’s been good to us. We’re grateful for that. And we’ve tried to be good back to Penn as well, in the ways that we can.

It was wonderful to talk with you both today. Thank you.