James von Klemperer
James von Klemperer, FAIA is a Design Principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates where he began as a young architect in 1984 and has since crafted a portfolio of work honored with over 150 awards including 9 AIA National Awards from multiple chapters.
His work ranges in scale from a house to a city, and he remains closely involved in each effort from conception to completion. In addition to focusing on his own projects, he leads the community of designers within the firm in exploring shared architectural agendas and goals. Jamie’s work has been recognized for design excellence, giving compelling form to complex programs, connecting major buildings to urban context, and using innovative techniques to unlock the challenges of difficult site conditions. His work ranges from the Ministry of Justice at Paris’ Parc Du Millenaire 3 & 4 to Washington D.C.’s Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics.
In New York, his design for One Vanderbilt, an AIA National Design Award winner, links Midtown’s tallest office tower directly to Grand Central Terminal. Each of these projects creates strong symbiotic relationships between program space and the public realm. At the larger urban scale, his design for New Songdo City extends this challenge to the scope of urban planning. The project was the first recipient of the Sustainability City award from the Urban Land Institute in 2004. In 2018, Jamie was awarded the American Prize for Architecture, also known as the Louis H. Sullivan Award, from the Chicago Athenaeum.
Jamie teaches at Yale, where he has served as Saarinen Visiting Professor as well as on the Deans Council, and at Columbia, where he has taught within the MSRED program for 6 years. He has lectured at Harvard, Columbia, Tsinghua, Tongji, Seoul National, and Yonsei Universities, the Royal Institution in London, the ESA in Paris, AMO in Lyon, and the University of New South Wales in Sydney. As his practice spans cultures and continents, much of its method lies in understanding the local spirit of a particular place, marrying it to the more universal advances of international practice.
