Events

Billie Tsien, Founder and Principal of Studio Tsien and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA)

Billie Tsien is a New York-based architect, mentor, and leading voice in the design and broader cultural community. Her approach to architecture is rooted in the spirit of collaboration with a portfolio imbued with a sense of optimism, warmth, texture, and serenity. She is a founding partner of Studio Tsien and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA), which for the past 40 years has completed award-winning projects for nonprofit, cultural, and academic institutions. Prominent examples include academic buildings at Princeton University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Bennington College, and University of California, Berkeley; public and institutional projects such as the Phoenix Art Museum, Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and the Lefrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Recent work includes the renovation of the David Geffen Hall at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, the U.S. Embassy Complex in Mexico City, and the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

In parallel to her architecture practice, Billie has taught at many institutions and is a devoted participant in many arts organizations. Appointed by President Biden as the first woman and Asian-American Chair of the Commission of Fine Arts (serving 2021–2025). She has also served as President of the Board of the Architectural League of New York and taught at institutions like Yale and Harvard. Her dedication to work and the cultural landscape at large has garnered her numerous awards including the National Medal of Arts, the 2013 AIA Architecture Firm Award, and the 2019 Praemium Imperiale presented by the Japan Art Association.

Tsien holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Yale University and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at Yale University and contributes to a range of cultural institutions such as the National Academy of Design, American Philosophical Society, American Academy in Rome, and American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she serves as president. Her work has been recognized with the Thomas Jefferson Medal Award in Architecture and the Architecture Firm Award of the American Institute of Architects, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. Tsien is steadfast in her mission to create a better world through architecture and to contribute to supporting a broader and more diverse cultural landscape.

Cynthia Davidson, Cofounder and Executive Director, Anyone Corporation; Visiting Critic, Cornell AAP

Cynthia Davidson is cofounder and executive director of the nonprofit Anyone Corporation, an architecture think tank in New York City. She is the editor of the international architecture journal Log, which she launched in 2003, and previously ANY magazine, an architecture theory tabloid (1993–2000). She is also responsible for more than 40 books in print, including 28 books in the Anyone project’s Writing Architecture series, published with MIT Press. She cocurated The Architectural Imagination, an exhibition of speculative projects for Detroit, which was first shown in the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and she started the pop-up architecture gallery Anyspace in New York in 2017. The American Academy of Arts and Letters recognized her work with its Architecture Award in 2014.

Davidson is a Visiting Critic at the Gensler Family AAP NYC Center (AAP NYC). She also teaches at Princeton University.