construcTWO

By Ingrid Spencer

Although Julie Ju-Youn Kim, AIA, bases her 3-to-4-person firm, construcTWO, in Washington, D.C., with a satellite office in Detroit, the answer she’ll give if you ask where her office is located might be “wherever my laptop is.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology M.Arch. graduate’s practice philosophy is to be nimble, facile, fluid, flexible, and continually moving forward. “I’m focused on process,” she says, “and being involved in a range of projects that can’t be boiled down to a concept, but have a continuing thread.”

The current range of work on the boards proves her words: a collaboration with HOK/D.C. for a series of light-rail stations in Detroit with dynamic LED lighting systems integrated into translucent glass-panel skins; a cultural arts center in Detroit with theater, gallery, studio, and offices; and a pool house in Knoxville, Tennessee, that integrates context with program. Completed commissions include a dentist’s office adaptive-reuse project that used multiple skins to bring light into a once-uninviting existing building, and a community center in Huntington Woods, Michigan. Each project has what Ju-Youn Kim calls “a shifting middle ground,” yet holds fast to its “architectural truths.” Take the Cultural Center, for example. For this project, which weaves itself through four floors of a historic building with a jazz club/cabaret, there’s an edge that exists between historic/modern, exterior/interior — the shifting middle ground. “And yet,” says Ju-Youn Kim, “the architectural truths exist in that we can be respectful of the history of the space, but our design isn’t dictated by that.” For this and every project, the architect develops a set of questions, then seeks to redefine the problems based on the constraints — budget, program, size, and issues of sustainability. “You can have a building that works, but there are other questions that can drive the design,” she notes.

Ju-Youn Kim is comfortable talking about who and what her firm is now; she should be, since this is not the first firm she has founded, though it is the first she runs single-handedly. In 1996, she, her husband (also an architect), and another partner founded the firm studiozONE in Detroit, where she was living at the time. Ju-Youn Kim says the experience — one she sought “even when I was working for other firms [SOM, Keyes Condon Florance]” — was invaluable, but the time came in 2000 when she saw the opportunity to branch out on her own professionally. She has never looked back. “My goals shifted,” she says.

One of the goals that hasn’t shifted is her desire to continue teaching, which she loves, and to be involved in the academic world of architecture. Her teaching appointments include jobs at the University of Detroit Mercy and the University of Maryland School of Architecture. “I love being engaged in the discussion,” she says, “and the spirit of experimentation. I feel like the way I run my design studios is very much how I’m running my firm. Framing the questions, and being process and project oriented. And always looking forward to the next design problem.”

She would like to grow her firm to a team of seven, continue to collaborate, continue to focus on craftsmanship, and use technology to amplify what she does. “Small projects, done well,” she says. “Cities are always evolving. They’re always moving. I’d like what I design to be part of that — to provide new layers.” 

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