Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake of KieranTimberlake to address Class of 2025, receive Dean’s Medal

UB School of Architecture and Planning Dean Julia Czerniak announced today that Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, the pioneering partners behind KieranTimberlake’s research-driven architectural practice, will address the Class of 2025 at the School’s 53^rd Commencement, which will take place on May 16^th at UB’s Center for the Arts.

“KieranTimberlake is not defined by a style. They stand out for their sensibility toward the process of design and building – at once inquisitive, rigorous, and generous in their response to site, client, and community,” says Czerniak, an architect and landscape architect who was employed by the firm in the early 1990s and has since collaborated with them on several commissions and competitions. “Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake are pathfinders — seeking ways forward with each project not just for themselves and their clients, but for the profession — and more importantly, for the diversity and breadth of the world beyond.”

In recognition of their contributions to the field and the betterment of the world, Czerniak will also present Kieran and Timberlake with the 2025 Dean’s Medal. The highest honor bestowed by the School, the Dean’s Medal recognizes individuals who have made an indelible impact on our professions through inspirational practice, scholarship, and leadership. Past recipients include American architect and futurist scholar Richard Buckminster Fuller, environmentalist Bill McKibbon, landscape architects Walter Hood and Michael VanValkenburgh, Gensler principal and Dean’s Council chairperson Madeline Burke-Vigeland, and a number of distinguished alumni.

Lifelong friends, Stephen Kieran, FAIA, and James Timberlake, FAIA, met as graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1970s and worked together at Venturi Scott Brown and Associates before studying at the American Academy of Rome as recipients of the prestigious Rome Prize.

Since founding the firm in 1984 out of a rowhouse attic in Philadelphia, the pair have built an international reputation with work that is simultaneously empathetic and provocative. With special expertise in education, arts and culture, government, civic, and residential projects, KieranTimberlake has earned more than 300 design citations. The firm was named to Fast Company magazine's prestigious annual list of the World's Most Innovative Companies in 2020 and received the AIA Firm Award in 2008 and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2010.

During its early years, Kieran and Timberlake established a firm-wide culture of problem solving through investigations in structures, systems, materials, and performance. Their design process asks questions at every juncture, is worked out in the firm’s prototyping and fabrication workshop, and relies upon collective intelligence. Earlier this year, KieranTimberlake, which employs 90 staff members with backgrounds in fields as diverse as ecology, anthropology and physics, transitioned from a partner model to 100 percent employee owned.

Among its earliest award-winning works was the 1993 adaptive reuse of the Shipley West Middle School building in Bryn Mawr, Pa., which has been documented for its poetic reference to a nearby dormitory designed by Louis Kahn and its use of emerging materials and construction processes.

The firm’s innovation was cited by architectural critics George Dodds and William Braham in a 1995 piece published in Werk Bauen + Wohnen: “Through strategically resisting normative architectural practice and building construction, [KieranTimberlake] has achieved in a relatively short period of time, an emerging critical position with the American architectural community. Unlike most other U.S architects who have established alternative practices through the polemics of writing and drawing, [the firm] has arrived at their architectural position through building rather than in opposition to it.”

That trajectory continued and in 2001 they received the inaugural Benjamim Latrobe Fellowship for architectural design research from the AIA College of Fellows. Their first book, Manual, revealed the architects’ preoccupations with details and their willingness to share knowledge with the industry. In 2003, they published their most recognized monograph, Refabricating Architecture, which sought to innovate design and construction with the nonhierarchical production structures advanced by the automobile, shipbuilding, and aerospace industries. Since 2002, they have co-authored seven books on architecture and more than a dozen journal articles. 

In 2003, the firm unveiled SmartWrap^TM, a transparent, energy-gathering polycarbonate skin, in a pavilion at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. That idea advanced in 2008 with Cellophane House, one of five “house of the future” concepts exhibited by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. The Loblolly House (2006) a private residence on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that is lifted off the ground by tree-like piles, integrates modular prefabricated elements for rapid on-site assembly and minimized environmental disruption. 

The firm’s recent projects reflect a continued focus on materials and the craft of building on land and site. The Embassy of the United States in London (2018) features a high-performance, energy efficient façade and landscape design that are both secure and open, fostering engagement with the surrounding community and creating a new architecture of diplomacy. In 2022, KieranTimberlake completed the John A. Paulson Center, a vertical campus with a complex spatial program that now forms the gateway to New York University in Greenwich Village. Its 2024 renovation of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., carefully reinvents the library’s Beaux-Arts design with a below ground addition that both improves public access and enhances the institution’s role as a cultural hub.   

“For KieranTimberlake, architectural practice is one of optimism — optimism that the built environment can improve lives, create a healthier planet, and catalyze an equitable, culturally rich world.”