Meejin Yoon

Co-Founder and Principal, Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP | Incoming Dean, Cornell AAP (spring 2019) | Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Signal to Noise"

Architecture is a broadcast medium; a low definition form of communication, and a faint signal surrounded by an blizzard of noise. This condition of information overload, distraction and a superabundance of channels is the cultural backdrop of our lives. How can architecture communicate, create space and focus attention in the age of accelerated signals? Delivering this year's Bethune Lecture, Meejin Yoon shares recent projects from memorials to submersibles to buildings that explore these questions.

AIA Continuing Education Credits Available: 1 LU

J. Meejin Yoon is an architect, designer, and educator. She is currently a Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will begin her appointment as Dean of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in 2019. Yoon is the co-founder of Höweler + Yoon Architecture LLP and MY Studio. Her design work and research investigate intersections between architecture, technology, and public space. 

Yoon has been widely recognized for her innovative and interdisciplinary teaching and work. She received the ACADIA Teaching Award in 2016, the New Generation Design Leadership Award by Architectural Record in 2015, the Irwin Sizer Award for Most Significant Improvement (and Innovation) to Education at MIT in 2013, the United States Artist Award in Architecture and Design in 2008, and the Rome Prize in Design in 2005.  Her design work has received numerous awards including the Progressive Architecture Award, the Architecture Record’s Design Vanguard Award, the Architecture League’s Emerging Voices Award, as well as national and local AIA awards and honors. 

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the National Art Center in Japan, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.  Yoon is the co-author of Expanded Practice: Projects by Höweler + Yoon and MY Studio (Princeton Architectural Press 2009), and Public Works: Unsolicited Small Projects for the Big Dig (MAP Book Publishers 2008).  Her artist book, Absence, a memorial to the World Trade Center bombing, was published by Printed Matter and the Whitney Museum of Art in 2003.  

Yoon received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University with the AIA Henry Adams Medal in 1995, a Master of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction from Harvard University in 1997, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Korea in 1998.