Designing a Better Future
Max Kuo does it all: he is an architect, artist, writer, teacher and father. He is the husband of history teacher Hijoo Son and lives on the second floor of Dunbar with her and their two children. Right now, Kuo is focused on his architecture and teaching career, as he teaches a studio class at Harvard twice a week and will start teaching a drawing class at Exeter next term. Despite his busy schedule, Kuo still leaves time for his kids and his first passion of art and design.Before moving into the world of architecture, Kuo was an artist. He received his BA at UCLA’s Department of Art and then was an Artist-in-Residence at the Whitney Museum, Independent Studies Program in 2003 and Red Gate Residency in Beijing in 2004-2005.His interdisciplinary art practice explored a multitude of mediums, and during his early 20’s, Kuo’s art exhibitions spanned a range of topics and techniques. “I did everything,” he said.Kuo calls himself a “conceptual artist,” so his work is very project based. He does “paintings, drawings, installations, performances, video, a little bit of everything.”One of Kuo’s favorite exhibitions was a performance piece he debuted in his 20’s in Beijing, China. Kuo was very interested in how quickly the city was changing as “ you would go to a neighborhood and then go back the next week and the entire neighborhood would be gone, just completely demolished,” and also how the economy was bringing so many diverse and different people together from “migrant labor from Western China or foreign architects or artists.”This inspired him to do a performance where he hauled one ton of scrap metal into the center of a big concrete warehouse space while a Beijing punk band he had collaborated with played music, along with recordings he had made of street sounds from Beijing and Beijing radio stations that talked about the fast-paced development. He then used a plasma torch and cut a straight line through the scrap metal.“It was really interesting for me because the scrap metal had to withstand the architectural waste and destruction that was going on there,” Kuo said. “I was also interested in that straight line as a kind of line of demarcation, boundary line, property line and it also had resonance with minimalist art, landscape art and just bringing together such diverse groups of people.”
"I just realized I wanted to do something new.”
After years of being in Beijing as an artist “seeing such amazing architecture go up, and being interested in the social politics of space,” when Kuo applied for graduate school, he applied for art schools and architecture schools. “I just realized i wanted to do something new,” he said, “I was also very interested in architectural drawings as a medium. I got very excited about learning architecture, and have been in that world ever since.”Kuo then received his Masters in Architecture from UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design program in 2008 where he also received the Welton Beckett Fellowship. He has worked in many leading architecture offices since then. From 2010-2013, as an assistant professor at Soongsil University, Kuo taught design studios and seminars and lectured at Korea and Konkuk Universities.He currently is works with the design collaborative, ALLTHATISSOLID, that he was a founding partner in. He has partners all over the world, including innovative, cutting edge cities such as Los Angeles and in Kuala Lumpur. His partners usually represent a very young organization that specializes in small collaborative projects as they are very interested in design and experimentation.“Whenever we come to a particular project, we are really interested in experimenting with it. We still do exhibition based work,” Kuo said.One of Kuo’s favorite structures he has designed with ALLTHATISSOLID was an event structure for a rock concert in Kuala Lumpur.He is currently trying to push through to get a public arts commission in LA. It is a public gateway sculpture project that deals with landscape, sculpture, urbanism, and his partners are doing residential developments in New Zealand.Although he still practices as an architect, Kuo claims he is mostly focused on teaching and writing right now. “I've found myself going in the more academic direction,” he said, so he is teaching a studio course at Harvard and also “becoming more interested in the history and the discourse of architecture.”“Writing allows you to more critically reflect on what your position is as a designer rather than just having the client defining what you do,” Kuo said. “Writing allows you to define the world in which you operate, which, I think, is very important to an architect who tries to develop their own personal project.”At Harvard, Kuo teachers studio classes for the first two years of grad school architecture.He goes twice a week, and has 12 students, all of whom he meets with individually to help them works through issues with the building they are designing.Kuo is very excited to begin working at the Academy. “I think it'll be a lot of fun. It'll allow me to reconnect with my art interests, and do something that has nothing to do with architecture, which is great. Any chance I get to do something that doesn't deal with architecture is fun.”