Immigrant Stories

Toshiko Mori Challenges Strong Men Through Her Architecture

Of renovating buildings by masters she has said, "I'm respectful but not subservient"
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Japanese-American architect Toshiko MoriPhoto by Ralph Gibson

This is the latest in a series of profiles of immigrants who have made important contributions to the fields of architecture and design.

Toshiko Mori has designed projects as wide-ranging as a visitor center adjacent to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House in Buffalo and additions to houses by Paul Rudolph and Marcel Breuer. What may be intimidating challenges to some are invigorating to her. ”I like challenging strong men," she has said of her architecture. "I'm respectful but not subservient.”

The Mori-designed Visitor Center at Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, NY.

Photograph by Paul Warchol

Born in Kobe, Japan, Mori honed her aesthetic during childhood visits to Zen gardens and ancient temples. As a budding architect, she benefited from mentors on both sides of the Pacific. The Tokyo architect Kazuo Shinohara advised her to practice in the United States, where he said she would enjoy more freedom as a woman. Studying at the Cooper Union in the 1970s, she became a protégé of John Hejduk, the school's legendary dean. She then went on to work for the modernist Edward Larrabee Barnes. (While interviewing artists to design a fountain outside Barnes’s IBM building in Manhattan [1983], she met James Carpenter, who became her husband.)

Early in her career, she was recruited to design a Comme des Garçons boutique; she also did stores for Charivari and Issey Miyake. "People in fashion are great patrons of architecture," she once said, "because they understand experimentation.”

At the same time she was building her New York–based firm, she became chair of the architecture program at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Her recent projects include several houses in New York and New England; part of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA; and Thread, a clinic and artists’ residency in a remote part of Senegal.

Recalling her decision to emigrate, Mori says: "I grew up in a globally itinerant family, both in lifestyle and mindset. It gave me the ability to empathize with many different cultures and economic situations.” She adds: “I chose to stay and live in the U.S. because of the equal opportunity it provides and the values it represents of freedom and respect for human rights.”