About
We are full service architectural firm in new york city that combines cutting edge technology with natural and sustainable materials, committed to making meaningful work, rooted in its context of time and place.
We do not have a style, but rather a reverence for the simple and timeless beauty of an inspired idea; innovation balanced with an appropriateness of means, and an economy of expression. Instilled with the poetic, a successful work is capable of extending those fleeting moments, when sunlight upon the water touches our hearts - when we are truly alive, and raising the mundane rituals of the everyday into the sublime.
Process
Our process is specific to each project's needs—informed by the client(s), the specifics of its site, and the stories they tell. The most important starting point is an inspired idea.
From there, we work closely with the clients, consultants, fabricators, and contractors, in rigorous pursuit of its most appropriate expression, with every part considered integral to the whole, from overall site planning and landscaping to the smallest interior details, to ensure a cohesive composition in the end. We typically use standard AIA forms, with a fixed fee for design phases to allow clients to meet and consider ideas freely without concern over hourly billing in order to reach the best solution possible.
And, after all the dust has settled, the result is a place where silence sings.
Partners
Sustainability
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Somehow, in allowing ourselves to become separated from nature - no doubt born from our struggle, and ultimate victory, over the elements, we have put the very things we cherish and enjoy, and rely upon, in jeopardy.
We see the solution in fusing cutting edge technologies with the wisdom of vernacular architecture, considering every building to be inexorably linked to its site; its micro-climate, local culture, and ecosystem. Rather than fight natural processes, we use them to our ends; analyzing the paths of the sun and wind, employing passive solar strategies to inform the siting and most effective orientation of a building, geothermal wells to harness the stable core temperature of the earth, combined with the natural ability of mass to store heat (and release it slowly) to provide highly efficient heating and cooling, and the careful selection of local and renewable materials to root a building in its site and ensure its sustainability.
These ideas are as appropriate today as they were for the centuries old earth sheltered dwellings of China, and the thermal mass coupling used in the cliff dwellings of the American Indian.
Julian King AIA LEED AP
founding partner
After receiving his BArch at Cornell University, studying under renowned historian Colin Rowe, and Julienne de la Fuente, (Le Corbusier's chef de bureau in his Paris Atelier) Julian King went on to work with Richard Meier, contributing to the design of the Getty Center, the Museum of Television and Radio, the Jean Arp Museum, the Rachofsky House, the Sandra Day O'Conner Courthouse, and the Gagosian Gallery, among other award winning projects.
Julian King has also worked closely with Todd Dalland at FTL/Happold on daring tensile fabric structures, and Donna Karan's offices in New York, and Rafael Vinoly on the Carl Icahn Laboratory, Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics for Princeton University, with structural glass entries, and an array of 40’ tall motorized louvers that track the path of the sun to limit the thermal gain on a expansive curving flexible cable stayed glass curtain wall—the first of its kind in North America, as well as Francois DeMenil and Lee Skolnick, designing a residential addition accessed by a bridge through the trees, and a large residential compound in East Hampton, and villas in Anguilla, respectively.
In 2004, he established julian king architect, dedicated to the realm of ideas, and innovative uses of a wide range of materials—from a curving tensile fabric tennis pavilion echoing the seams of a tennis ball, to his memorial design for The Dr Martin Luther King Jr Memorial International Design Competition, chosen as a finalist out of over 1200 entrants from 26 countries, that invites visitors to stand before a fire hose, repelled invisibly by a 16” tall free standing borosilicate glass wall with the words “FREE AT LAST” imbedded in it, protected as if by the beauty of the idea alone, or his clear polycarbonate spherical room coated with transparent photovoltaic silicone drops in the shape of continents of the Earth, set into a roof garden atop an existing building in London, and his post tensioned walls of 100,000 cast glass bottles for his Holocaust Memorial design. In 2009, Julian King was awarded first prize in the international Shinkenchiku Residential Competition in Japan, out of over 900 entrants, for a small but profound project in Italy, and his townhouse in Chelsea, New York City, chosen for the Dwell/NYM home tours for Octoberfest. In 2010, Julian King was selected as the emerging architect by Architectural Record, and as one of the top fifty designers in NYC. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Architectural Record, Elle Decor, Wallpaper, Frame, Japan Architect, Fabric Architecture, and International Architecture + Design Magazine, among many others, including the hardcover book Interiors in Detail: 100 Contemporary Rooms, by Dominic Bradbury.
Julian King has served as a Master Class Lecturer in the School of Graduate Studies at FIT, a guest critic for The Cooper Union School of Architecture, and The Illinois School of Architecture, and is a member of the AIA, NCARB certified to allow reciprocity in 49 states and Canada, and currently licensed in the state of New York and New Jersey, and a LEED Accredited Professional by the U.S. Green Building Council.
When not in the office, he is probably playing tennis, having played competitively, and still a little nutty about it.
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Christina Lyons SEGD
partner
clyons@juliankingarchitect.com
After undergraduate studies at The University of Vermont, and a masters in communication design at Pratt University, Christina Lyons worked with Poulin + Morris in NYC, and went on to become the director of the graphic design department at Lee Skolnick Architecture + Design, contributing to the Muzeiko: Children's Museum (Sofia Bulgaria), The New York Historical Society, The Sony Wonder Technology Lab, the Aileron Center for Entrepreneurial Education, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Off the wall for the Society for Experimental Graphic Design at the AIGA gallery, the America: Now + Here traveling exhibit, the Live Work: Skyline Street exhibition at the Center for Architecture, and many other award winning projects.
Christina Lyons is currently the department chair and associate professor of the Graduate Exhibition and Experience Design Department at FIT, having taught exhibition and graphic design at FIT since 2010, and is a member of the board of directors of the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) since 2016, and the chair of the SEGD Academic Task Force. In 2021, Christina Lyons was honored with the FIT Faculty Excellence Award.
She has been published in Theory and Practice of Motion Design: Critical Perspectives and Professional Practice and The Society for Experiential Graphic Design, and has lectured at the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums, The Society for Experiential Graphic Design Academic Summit, X-lab, and the National Association for Interpretation.
Christina is an avid skier, and print artist as well, with gallery exhibits of her prints in Vermont and New Jersey.
Collaborators
Sean Barry
Marcin Malzcek
Michael Langwell
Adrian Castineira
Julie Boyton
Russell Harper
Photography
Michael Moran (Soho Loft)