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).
From the article:
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.
November 2021
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.
March 2019
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.”
March 2018
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.
December 2016
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.”
November 2016
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.”
October 2016
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.
February 2016
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.”
December 2015
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
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
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
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
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
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 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.”
