Face of the AIA

Summary: Sheila Kennedy, AIA, is a principal of Boston-based Kennedy & Violich Architecture Ltd. (KVA) and a professor of the practice of architecture at MIT. Designated with her partner Frano Violich, FAIA, as one of Fast Company’s 2007 Masters of Design, Kennedy is described as an “insightful and original thinker who is designing new ways of working, learning, leading and innovating.”

Kennedy directs KVA’s pioneering material research division MATx, which has created designs and technology applications for Dupont, Siemens, Osram, The North Face, and the U.S. Department of Energy. For Herman Miller, KVA MATx designed the Convia Smart Building Infrastructure, which allows users to reconfigure building services and space without waste from demolition and rewiring. Convia was recognized with the 2007 Building’s Innovation Award Grand Prize and the 2008 Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum and was selected in 2009 for the new headquarters of the U.S. Green Building Council in Washington, D.C.

The KVA MATx Portable Light Project, a global initiative to deliver clean energy and light in a textile form factor, received the 2009 Energy Globe Award and the 2008 Tech Museum Laureate Award for technology that benefits humanity. Initially conceived as an energy harvesting resource for nomadic peoples, Portable Light is now being piloted in four countries to provide renewable power for mobile phone connectivity and renewable light for education, cottage industries, and conservation work.

The SOFT HOUSE, designed by KVA MATx, is a digitally fabricated “flat pack” grid shell house that can be made of recycled paper or wood products such as plywood or cardboard. The SOFT HOUSE design transforms household curtains into energy harvesting and light emitting textiles that adapt to the space needs of homeowners and generate up to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity.

Education: I have a background in history, philosophy, and literature in the College of Letters program at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I went to Paris to improve my French language abilities, because learning a second language was a prerequisite for the College of Letters program. I ended up spending five years in Paris, where I completed the first professional cycle of the public university the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in architecture. Then I went to the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University. Five years later, as associate professor I directed the MArch II Design Program at the GSD from 1990 to 1995.

Founding KVA: It was just the two of us when we started in1990. I met Frano in graduate school, and we had both worked in Switzerland. We had done competitions together and won. We enjoyed working with each other, so we knew that we wanted to open up our own practice as soon as we possibly could. Now there are 18 in the firm. KVA is structured as a design atelier, or workshop, and this size works well for us.

On launching a materials research division: We have an interdisciplinary practice, so we take on projects in architecture that engage both new materials and traditional materials. There was a lot of interest in the world of material science around 1998 with the discovery of the blue phosphor in Japan. This natural crystal structure emits lights in the blue range; it was the missing material element necessary to produce energy efficient digital white light. We could see the significance that semiconductor materials and white digital light could have in architecture. Two years later, we launched MATx to explore those possibilities.

The Portable Light: The Portable Light Project was launched in 2004 and was an outgrowth of our MATx work with solid-state lighting, sensors, and solar materials in architecture. We developed ways of working across the fields of architecture, digital electronics, material science, and design to bring together performative materials that produced light, or generated energy such as flexible solar thin film. We studied these materials and researched their effects and formal possibilities. This enabled us to understand what LEDs, microprocessors, and solar materials can do and to develop a new area of design that creates techniques to integrate these capabilities in ordinary things such as textiles and building industry materials such as concrete, glass, and plywood.

Semiconductor materials are fascinating because they move from one state to another and operate dynamically over time. So—with a little bit of natural sunlight, for example—a semiconductor material can produce electricity, demonstrating what’s called the “photovoltaic effect.” The other side of that same material coin is when materials emit light using only very small amounts of electrical energy—as light emitting diodes do. What’s incredible about LEDs is that they’re extremely energy efficient and have the potential to transform the experience of light in architecture. I’m glad that our practice has been able to contribute to the adoption and use of these smart materials in buildings and cities, and there’s plenty of work that still needs to be done.

The Portable Light project is now expanding. We’ve been working in two sites in Mexico, and in 2009 we’ll be adding two new pilot projects in Nicaragua and South Africa. In Nicaragua we are working with Paso Pacifico, an NGO that trains local villagers to work in ocean and land conservation. The land corridors between North and South America in this region are important to maintain biodiversity. The Portable Light project will be used in rural villages to support local education and school projects, and will enable villagers to earn a living with turtle conservation at night. We’re adapting the white light to red light with a snap-on film, because turtles that lay eggs on the beaches aren’t bothered by red light.

In South Africa, we’re collaborating with the I-Teach Program at Edendale Hospital, which is developing an innovative, comprehensive treatment program to respond to the co-epidemic of HIV and tuberculosis in KwaZulu-Natal. Many patients who are suffering from HIV also have multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Many people have access to cell phones in rural areas but the electricity system is not reliable or not in place. Portable Light solar textile kits are being integrated into hospital warming blankets to enable people who are suffering from MDR TB and HIV to harvest clean energy during their daily treatment outdoors in the sun. The energy will provide power for patients and their families and enable them to receive health care information via SMS text messages on their mobile phone.

The SOFT HOUSE: The SOFT HOUSE takes its name from the soft path, the concept of many different sources of energy in a distributed system working together. It’s an idea authored by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and it dates back to the 1970s. We asked ourselves how we could design a digitally fabricated house that could be affordable and that could have a point-of-purchase alternative energy system that a homeowner could tailor to her or his own energy needs and budget.

We are now working with a consortium of manufacturers to make that idea happen. We had a prototype model at the Vitra Design Museum that demonstrated at full scale how something as simple as household curtains could be used to capture energy from the sun and store it in lightweight batteries. That clean energy could then be used to support household lighting as well as household work/live programs. It is a hybrid house model that enables the homeowner to install energy harvesting textiles that significantly reduce electrical demand while still having the house connected to a primary electrical grid.

A homeowner would pay less for electrical services because the SOFT HOUSE allows a homeowner to take a number of different energy applications off grid, particularly those that have to do with portable work: laptop computers, digital cameras, PDAs. These pieces of equipment that everyone uses do consume energy, and they’re very well suited for the DC ring, a direct current ring, which is the new hybrid distribution system that’s proposed in the SOFT HOUSE.

The next architectural evolution: I think that, a lot of time, innovation in architecture or technology overstresses the novel, placing too much emphasis on the new. I believe it was Edwin Land who said: “It’s not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.” I think that there isn’t going to be a revolution in architecture, but I certainly hope there can be an evolution.

Part of that evolution has to do with the idea of agency in architecture, and our ability to formulate ways to transform existing modes of practice while still working in them. Practitioners and educators in architecture have become increasingly aware that the organizational concepts and spatial concepts that we inherited from modernism are no longer adequate to meet the environmental and societal challenges of a world that is rapidly urbanizing. We are shifting from centralized to distributed regimes of information, fabrication, finance, energy. I’m interested in how the discipline of architecture as a whole and its allied fields of design can accelerate what I feel is a gradual cultural evolution from a centralized commodity-based notion of energy, to what I sometimes call a diaspora: the idea of disbursed collection of performative materials.

Each of those materials would have its own formal and aesthetic problems and potentials, and each of those materials needs to be designed, fabricated, and integrated into multiple materials, surfaces, objects, and elements of architecture. It’s quite different than the inherited Modern idea that our building services should be encapsulated within the space of a hollow wall. We’ve evolved beyond that, and I think that understanding the consequences of this diaspora will be part of the next evolution. What’s important is that we begin thinking about that now.

A person might ask: “Why should the discipline of architecture become involved in addressing these questions?” In emerging distributed models of energy, elements of urbanism, architecture, infrastructure, and mobile objects can overlap, at times engaging a traditional, centralized grid and at other times functioning independently. In projects such as the SOFT HOUSE or the Portable Light Project, we’ve developed ways in which “independent” materials and architectural elements can also link with one another to become greater than the sum of their parts. Architecture is a medium well suited to explore these possibilities, which are fundamentally spatial and formal, social, and material.

Hobbies: I love everything that has to do with the ocean, and I enjoy swimming and snorkeling. Although this is not a ‘hobby,” the most forward edge of our research has been focusing on bioluminescent materials, or the way that nature produces light. I’ve been on some absolutely fascinating expeditions recently in Equador and Baja looking at the phenomenon of bioluminescence. I’ve been studying living light in photoreceptors and in the phenomena of ocean-going bioluminescence, primarily in fish, jellyfish, and dynoflagelates. The ocean is an incredible source of new materials!

Favorite retreat: I like to come into our studio early on Sunday morning. That’s my retreat.

Last book read: I actually just reread Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. There are two very good chapters, “on lightness” and “on quickness.” The idea of agility in a practice of architecture is something that interests me. I try to reread books that are important to me every so often and find in them something new.

Advice for young architects: Never underestimate the power of the architectural imagination. I would say that for young architects, the education that we get as architects provides us with a way of thinking that’s going to be increasingly important in the creative economy. If young architects can find a way to do their research and do work that interests them—and if they can find a way to intersect those interests and motivations with larger issues in the world—then so much the better.

(adapted from AIArchitect, Doer’s Profile, vol. 15, February 29, 2008)

Copyright 2008, The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved.