“Journalist of dreams; animation artist; author; designer of buildings, bowls and benches; Kyna Leski has dedicated her lifework to the creative process.”
Kyna Leski is a founding principal of 3six0 Architecture, where she plays a primary role in the beginnings of projects: taking what is known, creating a diagram of a “whole” that is greater than the sum of its parts, and setting design in motion. 3six0 has received numerous honors, most recently for its design of the Community Music Works Center. Leski’s design for A House of Visual Shadows won first place among 480 entries in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition.
In addition to designing buildings and furniture, Leski is an illustrator, animator and writer. Her book The Storm of Creativity, published by The MIT Press (2015) was translated into Turkish, Ukrainian, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Korean. Penguin Random House published a paperback edition in 2020. She has spoken about the creative process from the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California to Pop!tech in Camden Maine; from Quito, Ecuador to Stockholm, Sweden to Seoul, Korea.
Leski is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Architecture and Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2017, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from DesignxRI and was inducted into its Hall of Fame.
Leski is a Professor of Architecture at The Rhode Island School of Design where she has served as Department Head, Graduate Director and Head of RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome. She has taught in the Architecture, Experimental and Foundation Studies and Industrial Design departments and was a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China.
Her pedagogy recognizes ideas that emerge through making and engagement with material, intentions that develop through reiterative processes, and the formation of a syntactic architectural language moving from material to architectonic and spatial order. This pedagogy is explored in The Making of Design Principles.
Statement by Kyna Leski:
My work is dedicated to exploring, witnessing, and practicing the creative process. I have listened and observed its workings as a teacher, a student, a maker, a writer and a designer.
Growing up, I watched my father design buildings—from his drawings and sketches through their realization and eventual reception by the public to whom they still belong. It was an education in process: from design to architecture, and in the complicated relationship between stated intention and the eventual experience of the inhabitant—the transsubjectivity between them.
I live in a city whose name, (“pro-videre”) signifies what creativity is: a process of “seeing ahead.” We “see ahead” when we make designs that are materialized in the future, when we write problems that anticipate solutions, when we link one step to another as we navigate our lives and the way through anything, especially the empty page, writer’s block, confusion, chaos, needs, and questions.
As an educator I am dedicated to embodied learning, to the precision of mind that comes from measured making and to the clarity of abstraction. As an observer, I seek to learn something, to be surprised by the author’s soul voice and to find coherence where there was none before.
As a maker of things, designer, and writer, I dwell in uncertainty, follow poetry as a process, reason with material, construct, deconstruct and reconstruct—conceptual clarity appearing as a guide. The creative process is the story of this passage and speaks for the author, to the user, the reader, inhabitant, audience or viewer.