To mark KPF’s 50th anniversary, The Architect’s Newspaper recounts the firm’s history and singular ethos in a front-page feature.
Tracing the firm’s arc from its 1976 founding by Eugene Kohn, William Pedersen, and Shelley Fox to its current status as a multi-generational, globe-spanning practice, the piece credits KPF’s ability to navigate periods of change to a unique structure built on shared leadership and complementary strengths rather than a single visionary. “The importance of that three-legged stool is felt. Everybody has a different role,” notes Principal Forth Bagley. President Jamie von Klemperer concurs, emphasizing, “We’ve never been fronted by a major leader. Leadership has always been shared and evolved.”
Author Ian Volner asserts that across three continents and eight offices, the 650+ KPF team members “seem to have done it all,” and yet are “still intent on doing more, showing the world how cities get built.” The firm’s distinct culture, the feature argues, is what allowed KPF to move fluidly from 1980s postmodern landmarks like 333 Wacker Drive, to large-scale urban work like Hudson Yards and Jinling Road, to major recent New York projects including 520 Fifth Avenue and One Vanderbilt. “Among its more ineffably KPF aspects is its inextricable relationship to the streetscape and ground-floor infrastructure,” writes Ian of the latter project. Principal Trent Tesch highlights KPF’s acute attention to context and describes the angled cuts at One Vanderbilt’s base, made to defer to neighboring Grand Central Terminal: “If we didn’t cut it back, it would have felt very oppressive on the site. This gave it some air.”
The article attributes KPF’s ability to work on such diverse, large-scale projects to its cross-generational and cross-disciplinary collaboration. As Senior Associate Principal Anna Pietrzak remarks, “There’s no sense of physical boundaries here: The partners’ offices don’t even have doors.” While designing TP-LINK LXD, a recent project in Shenzhen, Anna worked with Global Director of Design Technology, Luc Wilson, to analyze performance metrics of various designs. He explains: “For me, data is like a Rubik’s cube,” and tech-informed design combinations create more sustainable, human-centric buildings.
Fifty years in, the article suggests that KPF’s urban legacy stems from “its enduring ability to synthesize a broad range of urbanist ideas and wed them to a working process that can produce reliable results,” in city after city, decade after decade. As Principal Marianne Kwok, who has been with the firm for 32 of its 50 years, puts it: “Every day is a different project. There’s always something new to learn.”
