Billie Tsien on Imbuing Buildings With Feeling

Growing up in the 1950s in the only Chinese family in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Billie Tsien always felt like an outsider. She would seclude herself in the shower of her family’s home’s master bathroom, behind closed doors, escaping into books for hours before her parents, who had originally moved to America from Shanghai to study at Cornell, would find her. Through this Tsien developed a deep understanding of the value of a rich interior life—a concept she has gone on to apply to her work at the New York–based architectural practice Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Partners (TWBTA), which she co-founded with her husband, Tod Williams, in 1986. 

The ethereal craft inherent in TWBTA’s structures, which include parks, libraries, museums, and other people-focused places, emanates from Billie and Tod’s belief that architecture is an act of service, and an opportunity to create quiet moments where visitors can indulge in the simple yet powerful emotions that can be stirred when encountering beauty. When Tsien, now 72, reflects on her firm’s philosophy—which entails making buildings that transcend solutions, that respect the earth, and that are measured by the lives lived within them—it’s clear that she profoundly, even poetically, shapes each project’s awe-inspiring energy. 

Tsien’s deliberate, unhurried methodology is apparent in everything she does. She advocates for listening and community engagement—a central part of her firm’s high-profile, often controversial public works, such as Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation (2012), Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art (2019), and Chicago’s Obama Presidential Center, which is slated to break ground this fall. Tsien and her staff spend time with the craftspeople who create many of their materials—including Dutch textile artist Claudy Jongstra, whose vibrant felt paintings grace the walls of New York’s David Rubenstein Atrium (2009), and Danish brick-makers whose product features on the facade of dormitories at Pennsylvania’s Haverford College (2012)—and select them according to the emotional responses they elicit. She gives the same focused attention to the holistic experience of a building as she does the handrails that will go inside it. When it comes to the planet, Tsien thinks buildings should embrace measurable ways to minimize their environmental footprints as well as immeasurable ones, such as the meandering pathways of the LeFrak Center (2013), in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, that invite people to appreciate the natural wonders around them.

On this episode, Tsien details the origins of and rationale behind her approach to the built environment, talking with Spencer about designing structures as containers for life, why history doesn’t unfold in a straight line, and architecture as both an honor and a responsibility.