Journalist of dreams; animation artist; author; designer of buildings, bowls and benches; Kyna Leski has dedicated her lifework to the creative process.

As a young girl she witnessed her father design projects from his drawings and sketches through to their realization and reception by the public to which they still belong. It was an education in process, the workings of intuition-to design-to building, the difficult relationship of stated intention to experience and the transubjectivity between. These early ponderings underpinned her work as a student at The Cooper Union and Harvard’s GSD; her work as a designer and principal (with Chris Bardt) of 3six0 Architecture. It has been fed and nourished by over three decades of teaching design at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she is Professor in Architecture. She has served as Department Head and Head of RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome. Kyna has given talks from the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach California to Pop!tech in Camden Maine. She is the author of The Storm of Creativity, published by The MIT Press (2015) and translated into Turkish, Russian, Chinese and Korean.

 Statement by Kyna Leski:

“I explore, witness, and practice the creative process through my work and my teaching. As a child, I was reprimanded for “getting bored easily,” and now I see that weakness, like all “weaknesses,” as a strength. (Getting bored keeps me moving ahead.) 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 in navigating our lives and the way through anything, especially the empty page, writer’s block, confusion, chaos, needs, and questions. The creative process is the story of this passage and speaks for the author, to the user, the reader, inhabitant, audience or viewer.

I have listened and observed these workings as a teacher, a student, a maker, a writer and an architect myself. 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 a student, an aspiring/practicing actor and witness I seek to learn something, to be surprised by the author’s soul voice and to find coherence where there wasn’t any. 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. I watch the sunrise almost everyday from a rowing shell, am moved to tears by honesty, and take dreams very seriously.”

Contact: kyna.leski@gmail.com

Published by MIT Press

Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, Kyna Leski tells us, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writer’s block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. In this book, Leski draws from her observations and experiences as a teacher, student, maker, writer, and architect to describe the workings of the creative process.

Leski sees the creative process as being like a storm; it slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes us—if we are willing to let it. It is dynamic, continually in motion; it starts, stops, rages and abates, ebbs and flows. In illustrations that accompany each chapter, she maps the arc of the creative process by tracing the path of water droplets traveling the stages of a storm.

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Leski describes unlearning, ridding ourselves of preconceptions; only when we realize what we don’t know can we pose the problem that we need to solve. We gather evidence—with notebook jottings, research, the collection of objects—propelling the process. We perceive and conceive; we look ahead without knowing where we are going; we make connections. We pause, retreat, and stop, only to start again. To illustrate these stages of the process, Leski draws on examples of creative practice that range from Paul Klee to Steve Jobs, from the discovery of continental drift to the design of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia.
Creativity, Leski tells us, is a path with no beginning or end; it is ongoing. This revelatory view of the creative process will be an essential guide for anyone engaged in creative discovery.

Chinese version by Beijing United Publishing, Summer 2020

Turkish publication October 2017: http://www.mediacatonline.com/yaraticilik-firtinasi-kyna-leski/

Korean Translation. Epiphany Press, July 2017

Russian Translation. EKSMO Publishing House, September 2017.

 

 

Endorsements

“A definitive guide to swimming through creative chaos, The Storm of Creativity shows us how to flow effortlessly through the process of birthing new, original ideas into the world.”
—Joe Gebbia, Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Airbnb

 

“We spiral through our lives trying to do our work, and Kyna Leski understands the elusive complexity of it all. I love the air and light in the book. Thank God she has written a how-not-to book that helps us understand how to do it. And not do it.”
—Maira Kalman, author of The Principles of Uncertainty

 

“This is a book about the thoughtful journey of creativity. Life is about going from not knowing to knowing. This blank, this zero from which I start every project is understood by Kyna Leski. Going from not knowing to knowing is my time of peace, and it is the time of creativity. This theme, threaded throughout the book, is a source of confidence and terror all at once. It is how we give up comfort and preconception to discover the essence of design. You will enjoy reading Kyna Leski’s illuminating account of the creative process.”
—Richard Saul Wurman

 

“I have always believed that a true creative process begins with a state of ambiguity because true creativity happens when it deviates, and your judgment can rely only on your level of impulse. In The Storm of Creativity, Kyna Leski vividly describes with precision and in a few words how such initial ambiguous emotion and imagination can become, from beginning to finish, a form of clarity.”
—Wang Shu, Dean, School of Architecture, China Academy of Art; 2012 Pritzker Prize winner

 

“There is perhaps no intellectual who is as in tune with the vulnerability of the creative process and the uncertainty from which innovation emerges as Kyna Leski. On the one hand, her focus on ‘unlearning’ takes us back to our most elemental moments of learning as a child, but also, on the other hand, to our most corrupted ideological predispositions. In her thinking, she develops critical mechanisms that braid the arts, sciences, and humanities to bring the various disciplines into conversation as part of the process of discovering. In this book, Leski brings the best of Cooper culture, as a school of thought, to a broader audience.”
—Nader Tehrani, Dean, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union

 

find more information at mitpress.mit.edu/9780262029940

 

 

 

October 25, 2023

Anthony Candido

Anthony Candido was my first studio professor at The Cooper Union. The projects he gave shaped my understanding of architecture and pedagogy. I remember being at my desk and suddenly realizing that he was standing next to me as I worked. His presence disappeared into saying what was necessary to induce contemplative practice.

 

It started like this: “2 posts (8” x 8” square; 12’ long). Span them. Brace them.”

 

At first, I contemplated (and tackled) a structural problem. Then I contemplated  a construction problem. I contemplated form. When one spans and braces two posts, there is a portal: a here and a there and a through. That was when I understood, for the first-time, what architecture is. I’ve returned to that moment throughout my education and my career, carrying forth these lessons.