Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Pop quiz: Who’s responsible for the graphic identity or environmental design of the following projects?
• Great Rivers Greenway, the largest green space master-planning project in the nation
• MetroLink
• The new Busch Stadium
• Coors Field in Denver
• Shakespeare Festival St. Louis
• The Washington Avenue Loft District
• The eastern extension of the Delmar Loop
• Grand Avenue in Milwaukee
• The Indiana Avenue Cultural District in Indianapolis
• The Mall of America
• A Starbucks urban prototype
• The award-winning Madrid Xanadú and a nine-story mall in Yokosuka, Japan
(Hint: It’s an Obata. And not Gyo.)
Now retired, architect Gyo Obata, one of the founders of the international design firm HOK, was a formidable talent and a formidable father. His firstborn, Kiku Obata, grew up careful, quiet and perfect, as competitive as her father but far calmer. She, too, founded her own company, starting with graphic design and then integrating architecture and interior, landscape, lighting and environmental design—just as her father had. Unlike Gyo, though, she used the most soft-spoken, almost countercultural business practices imaginable: stayed deliberately behind the scenes, kept titles off the firm’s business cards, shied away from celebrity.
Now, at 57, she’s questioning her approach—just a little. When she turned 50, she started trusting the odd coincidences and intuitions that have been hiding all this time, tucked into the coils of her supremely rational brain. Then she started wondering if she might accomplish more if she were more direct, more forceful, more outspoken. She forced herself to socialize by convincing herself she’d meet at least one interesting person at every event. She even resolved to do some of the public speaking she’d always avoided.
But don’t expect her to raise her voice.
Kiku’s passionate about a lot (good design, politics, urban life, the environment) but so self-contained, you’d never know it. Her ego must eat alone in its room—it never cries to be fed, and when it is, it immediately cuts pieces to share. Kiku’s two grown daughters say they’ve never seen her overwhelmed or frazzled. Her brother, Gen Obata, can’t think of anything that makes her angry; her sister, Nori Obata, says maybe when the Cardinals lose.
After a couple of interviews with Kiku wearing a black Chanel suit of the thinnest wool, all electronics silenced, interruptions nonexistent and every comment thoughtful (no sense of haste, no blurted or tactless comments, no groping for the right word), you start to fantasize about seeing her with a really lousy head cold, trumpeting sneezes and spewing phlegm. Or hearing her sputter something ridiculous because she’s too mad to think straight. Or watching her screw something up royally.
Instead she remains serenely controlled, right and left hemispheres perfectly balanced. She works 80-hour weeks and enjoys every minute. To relax, she does maddening, near-insoluble puzzles—and she’ll stay up all night to solve them. She loves crunching numbers, and she’s a shrewd, if self-effacing, marketer. She gathers inspiration everywhere: photographing building facades and quirky signs; attending the Aspen Ideas Festival every year to hear challenging ideas about economics, technology, design, science, history and art; reading The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Wear Daily, W, The Sartorialist and David Sedaris.
“I have an insatiable curiosity,” she admits, “and I think that’s what drives creativity. Finding possibilities.”
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“She was born with black hair sticking straight up, and she just looked perfect,” her mother recalls. “So we called her Kiku, which in Japanese means ‘eternal joy and happiness.’”
They chose her name from a list supplied by her Japanese grandfather, Chiura Obata, then a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley. Zen Buddhist and Shinto, he believed nature was far more powerful than human beings. Back in the early ’30s, he would pack a donkey with tents and provisions and hike his family deep into the Yosemite Valley, where he’d spend entire summers painting landscapes as delicate as the morning mist.
The years passed peacefully. Then Pearl Harbor exploded, and his new country spat its rage at his old country. One day an old friend, an Army colonel, came to him and said, “You are going to get rounded up tomorrow. Here’s a pass to get your son out of town, so he can go to school somewhere else.”
Gyo boarded a train for St. Louis that evening, and Washington University welcomed him warmly. His parents wrote from the internment camp, where they had to eat potatoes—which the Japanese consider food for pigs. They did not complain; it was not their way.
As serious and disciplined as his parents, Gyo graduated from Wash. U. and went on to the elite Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he studied under Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero, who designed the Arch). One of the Cranbrook scholarship students was Majel “Midge” Chance, a weaving student who was easygoing and exuberant. She fell in love with the intense young architect, they married, and he eventually brought her to St. Louis—where he’d felt so welcome—and founded HOK here.
Kiku, their firstborn, started school in the Webster Groves district, but her parents were so appalled by the art program (“They had graph paper for every holiday, and you just colored in the squares—yellow and purple for Easter, red and green for Christmas,” Midge groans) that they swiftly transferred Kiku to the Community School in Ladue.
She was, after all, the 19th generation of artists in her father’s family.
When she was 4, she glued Cheerios wheels onto matchboxes to make tiny cars. When she was 5, she announced very clearly, “Mom, I don’t want you to clean my room anymore”—and proceeded to keep every object neatly in its place. “She always did things perfectly,” Midge recalls. “She was always quiet—we used to go around saying, ‘What? What did you say?’ But she knew what she wanted to do and just did it.” Gyo says, “In her quiet way, Kiku was very strong—independent, self-contained, in control of herself. She didn’t act like a baby!”
At age 5, Kiku helped take care of her new baby sister, Nori. The next year, Gen came along, and while he and Nori played, Kiku (whom they called Queenie) took gentle charge. For their birthday parties, she created a county fair; painted big cardboard boxes into a train they chugged around the yard; became the Banana Man, sewing banana appliqués to a coat and stuffing the pockets with presents.
Her most grievous mischief was coating her friend’s porch with Crisco so they could keep sliding after the rain evaporated. “My friend’s mother called my mom, screaming how it took her hours on her hands and knees to scrub it off,” she remembers ruefully. “I think my mom sort of thought it was funny.”
After the Crisco, Kiku stayed out of trouble; she never wanted her father to be mad at her. On Saturdays, she went to HOK’s offices with him, carefully touching the wood and stone samples, drawer pulls and miniature doors and tiny squares of tile. On Sundays, the whole family piled in the car and drove around looking at buildings. By age 5, Kiku had announced her life’s goal: “I want to see every building in the world and go inside and see what the people are doing.”
She insists she was a tomboy, although schoolmates recall her as “ethereal.” They maybe didn’t realize how fiercely competitive she was. She fell asleep listening to Cardinals announcer Jack Buck, and she trumped her family at penny poker and Pounce (“She was a master at seeing what was going on and acting quickly,” Gyo says). With the boy next door, Kiku played Indian ball, soccer, kickball, Sorry, Candyland, Chinese checkers and Parcheesi. “I would beat him a lot,” she admits, giggling. “He grew to hate me!”
By her teens, her game was tennis. “My dad could beat me no matter what,” she sighs. “He’d just lob it right over my head, and I’d be running back and forth. That’s when I figured out it’s all mental.”
Intensely clothes-conscious, young Kiku haunted the Pappagallo boutique—but she also made a topographical map out of wood scraps in shop class. At John Burroughs High School, she loved both AP calculus and art. As a little girl, she’d spent hours listening to the Bauhaus architects, Japanese woodblock artists, weavers and potters who visited her parents, and she adored her Uncle Kim, a commercial artist who created the original Monsanto logo and painted the first mountains on the Busch beer can.
Kimio was “the family Don Rickles”—he drank, smoked two packs a day and told jokes, in stark contrast to her father, who was “shy and intellectual and serious, more stiff.” Still, her dad had “a wacky sense of humor” when he let his guard down, as well as a restless curiosity. “He said I should always be asking questions about everything,” she recalls. “And my mother said, ‘You always have to leave things better than you found them’—which in a way is really about design.”
Kiku learned those lessons eagerly. She never got drunk or high; she liked consciousness and control. Her first adolescent trauma was a car accident, not her fault: Her car spun out of the lane, knocked down a tree and crashed into a telephone pole. She escaped with only a banged-up knee, but she was so jolted, in both mind and body, that she went to her room and didn’t come out for three days. When she emerged, she was fine; she’d slept and healed herself, like a cat.
Then, in February of her senior year, her father and mother announced that they were divorcing. Jolted again, Kiku refused to blame anyone and did everything she could to keep peace in the family. She graduated with honors and a long yearbook entry: gold medal in painting, news and feature editorships, secretary and treasurer of the senior class, varsity tennis. In the photo, she looks—well, ethereal, almost painted, her eyes soft and dark, her smile uncertain.
She spent most of that summer lying in a hammock in a girlfriend’s back yard, “almost catatonic,” trying to sort it all out.
“All of a sudden the whole world falls apart,” she says now. “It pushed me out of the nest in a big way: OK, you’re on your own.
“Then I went off to Stanford, and the whole world opened up.”
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Midge worried about her daughter that next year, envisioned her VW bus rocking perilously as the Golden Gate Bridge swayed, wondered why she didn’t come home when student demonstrations cancelled classes for an entire quarter. But neither did much calling, and Midge never visited campus—“I was going through stuff I didn’t want to discuss,” she admits.
In love with her view camera, Kiku was about to become Stanford’s first art major to specialize in photography. She hated classes being cancelled, but she attended the daily antiwar demonstrations and Allen Ginsberg’s Human Be-In. “Women were pulling off their bras on the street; everybody was challenging authority,” she says, elated just to have been there watching.
Months later, she went to see her advisor, “this very buttoned-up engineering professor who wore suits with skinny ties every day,” and found him in a tie-dyed shirt, with long hair. “What happened?” she asked, and he said, bemused, “I’m still not sure.”
She laughs, remembering his expression, then turns serious: “Maybe that’s why I’m so optimistic: It just gave me the hope that you can change things.”
Four years after college, she started her firm. It grew rapidly, but Kiku being Kiku, she deliberately shrank it again so she could have regular, relaxed, in-depth conversations with everyone on staff. She’s known for hiring smart, thoughtful designers, all good in their own right—so how does she get such a cohesive design style?
“We call it being Kikuized,” jokes Janet Wilding, deputy director for administration at Great Rivers Greenway. “I think it’s her aesthetic; I think they absorb it.”
Gen describes that aesthetic as “clean graphic. Fun and contemporary, and she loves color.”
Eric Thoelke, who worked for Kiku in the early years and now leads the high-profile TOKY Branding + Design, says that for all her seriousness, “She’s wonderful at whimsy and gentle humor; her work’s fun, bright, colorful, playful and a little quirky.”
“The palette is usually bright but controlled, say, six colors and shades of those colors used in different ways,” Wilding says. “It has a very, very modern feel; it’s clean, intellectual and refined, not fussy or ornate. Very controlled.”
Which is not to say that the Wild Pair boutique prototype—a funky, bohemian boudoir complete with bed, armoire, tomato-red walls and tattoo graphics—was left on the doorstep. It’s a legitimate Kiku Obata & Company design, as is the Art Deco/high-tech Pin-Up Bowl martini lounge and bowling alley, with its insertion of black and Latina “vintage” pinups. And the “loft aesthetic” of the Washington Avenue streetscape, with its cobblestones, recycled materials, cast-iron columns and layered patina. And the extension of the Delmar Loop, where people ride their bikes right into Big Shark Bicycle Company.
The firm’s versatile; it lives by brainstorming. When Gen worked there, his job (he studied architecture at Harvard) was to rapidly sketch the wildest building ideas he could imagine. When the brainstorms subside, the ideas get refined with tea-ceremony precision. By the time KO presents to the client, everything’s been thought through so carefully, it’s tough to pull apart.
If there is a problem, Kiku brings the whole team: This isn’t a “fix it at the top” firm, where she does the politicking and then goes back to the office to bark directions. The message is “We’re all working on it.” And they work with an unusual degree of collaboration. Other firms put architects, graphic designers and other specialists in their own ghettos. At KO, an interior designer might sit between an architect and an environmental designer, each team in its own “neighborhood.” After visiting, members of the American Institute of Architects asked wistfully, “How do you create that kind of culture?”—never dreaming it could be as simple as a seating chart.
With clients, Kiku listens closely, trying to really understand what they are saying and get them to elaborate on it so it makes sense. “What do you mean by that?” she’ll ask. “What do you think that should look like?” “What are you trying to accomplish?”
“I’ve learned to not take anything personally,” she says. “I just keep asking questions to get at why someone feels really strongly about something. There’s always a stopping point, and you need to know how to reach it and then negotiate through it.” As much psychotherapist as designer, she eases people away from knee-jerk irrationality and toward the clarity of a shared vision.
“The magic comes in pulling all their answers together, translating them into something tangible,” Kiku says. Tangible, sustainable (she cared about the environment instinctively, long before it was trendy) and above all, thoughtful. “‘This is how we do things.’ ‘This is how we’ve always done it,’” she mimics with rare exasperation. “Whenever I hear that, I’m going in the other direction.” “Plopped-down” designs annoy her; she wants to know exactly how what her firm designs will affect how people think and live. How it will inspire and delight them. How it will integrate historic building materials with new technology.
KO takes up two floors “backstage” of The Pageant on Delmar. Natural light floods the space; there’s a terrace garden where people drink coffee in the morning and theatrical velvet curtains to hide storage and muffle sound. Bold colors are carefully placed to create those “neighborhoods”; fresh, fun details are so subtle, they come as surprises instead of screaming for attention. Pinned-up blueprints and sketches don’t puncture every wall but confine themselves to the curved walls of conference areas. The usual mishmash of a creative working space is swept into order, calmed by an Asian simplicity.
“So many spaces are just not even thought about,” Kiku laments. “‘Here’s a box, let’s paint the walls and put in a dropped ceiling.’ There’s no thought to what that environment does to the psyche.”
That’s as close as she comes to criticizing other designers. She’ll groan in frustration about bad design, but she never attacks individuals. Or yells at her employees. Or gossips. Even within the safety of the family, she and her siblings don’t critique each other’s work. Ask other design professionals to critique Kiku, and they’ll refuse.
It gets boring.
Finally, reaching hard, I ask Thoelke if he’s ever heard someone criticize her or her work.
“Wouldn’t tell you if I had,” he replies firmly. “She is a lady, in the archaic use of that word, gracious, kind and warm. It’s a wonderful thing to find nowadays.”
KO shepherds clients from a sales culture into a marketing culture; from fax-and-phone into the cyberworld; from a fortysomething mind-set to a twentysomething one. “There’s a huge change in the country now between people who are growing up with technology and those of us who have learned it,” Kiku remarks. “We really think about what 20-year-olds want, what legacy we’re leaving them. Usually that kind of research is all about trends, but we’re looking for something deeper: their desires and needs, hopes and dreams. What do people love, what draws them?”
When Kiku branded (a word she, mercifully, seldom uses) the new Gateway Rivers Greenway agency, she boiled it down to three words: “Clean. Green. Connected.” Her firm’s latest GRG project is the old railroad trestle at the north end of downtown: It starts at Cass Avenue, passes through a grassy, overgrown area, crosses I-70 and ends up by Produce Row, then comes down at Branch Street. That’s where KO’s mission ends, but the trail continues across the McKinley Bridge, connecting walkers and bikers to the riverfront and to Illinois.
There are only two other elevated-trestle green spaces in the world: La Promenade Plantée in Paris and the High Line, under construction in New York City. Kiku’s catchphrase for ours is “Elevate Sustainability”: literally, with solar- and wind-powered lighting, dense foliage as a railing, garden respites along a curved path; and conceptually, by softening and reinterpreting the grungy industrial sites, encouraging recycling plants and green businesses and creating the idea of a Bike Village on Broadway, as bicycle-centric as Copenhagen.
She points to sketch after sketch, showing all the possibilities.
“It’s something,” she says, “that could really set us apart.”
At times like this, she’s dreamily idealistic. But when Kiku gives a presentation, Wilding says, “everything is very low-key, very aesthetically pleasing. She puts her briefcase aside and takes out this lovely little handmade paper notebook with a pen. She’s unassuming, very quiet. She does give her opinion—I think a lot of it is just her tone of voice. It’s the opposite of trying to talk over everybody; she talks under everybody, so people actually listen. It’s a charisma I don’t have or understand!”
Joe Edwards, king of the Loop (which was named one of the Great Streets in America last year by the American Planning Association, thanks to Kiku’s firm), says people listen because it’s worth the effort: “There’s a lot of substance to every sentence she speaks, and you learn that pretty fast.”
Karen Corsaro, president of The Corsaro Group, a strategy firm in Indianapolis, first worked with Kiku on the Mall of America project in Minnesota. Asked what she’s learned from Kiku over the past
16 years, she exclaims, “When to shut up!”
But Kiku’s reserve doesn’t always serve her well, Corsaro adds. “She can be in a room where others will not cede to her, and she will not necessarily battle it out with them.”
“The Japanese don’t want to bring any attention to themselves,” Kiku says with her quick smile. “After visiting Japan, I figured out that it’s not necessarily me being shy—it’s a very cultural thing! I like being behind the scenes and helping our clients.”
She’s never bothered doing much PR for the firm, which is, consequently, as soft-spoken as she is. But now she’s starting to wonder if she should “be a little bit more opinionated, express my opinions more. I probably shy away from conflict too much—that’s part of my Japanese heritage! I would love to be able to be—I probably should be—more direct and forceful.”
Nobody else seems to agree.
“In the end, you do find out what she really thinks,” Gen points out dryly.
And Thoelke notes that her firm’s already won international attention for St. Louis design, “and her multidisciplinary approach has been an inspiration for a lot of firms in town.” Of her notion that she might accomplish more if she were more outspoken, he says, “Isn’t that funny? I think Kiku’s good at getting things done the way she wants them done, without any drama or screaming at all.”
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Only one area of Kiku’s life has been uncontrollable, insoluble and anything but serene: marriage. “I applaud the people who do it well,” she says wryly. “I think because of my parents’ divorce, it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted in a relationship.”
She met the father of her two daughters, feisty Irish-Catholic trial lawyer Jim Malone, at Llywelyn’s—and refused his invitation to lunch because she suspected some chemistry between him and her girlfriend. Months later, Kiku finally agreed to lunch … and at 29, she married him. “I had already been married once,” she says. “I have been married three times.” Her teeth clench a bit at the sentence, but she continues evenly, “Jim and I had a very volatile relationship. We were married until ’85. But he’s now married to [KSDK-TV health-beat reporter] Kay Quinn, and we all get along really well. We fought like crazy for a long time, got rid of all the issues.”
Which were …? “My desire to work and be an independent female is really why I couldn’t be married to the people I was married to,” she says. “I think if you asked them, they would all say, ‘No, no, that’s not true.’ But it’s how I felt. I swear, you get married, and all of a sudden someone flips a switch and there’s a role in someone’s mind.”
She’s now with Kevin Flynn, the type she should’ve looked for all along: steady, loyal, smart, workaholic and almost as quiet as she is. Someone who knows them both describes him fondly as “a frumpy, khaki-pants architect” who’s more grounded, cynical and politically savvy than she is. (“She always wants to think the best of people,” Flynn says with a fond sigh.)
Flynn is executive vice president of KO. He and Kiku work long hours, sync their schedules electronically, travel together and, in their spare time, drive around looking at buildings. Their desks face each other in a single office—more intimacy than most married couples experience.
They met when their separate firms were working on the Kiel Center project; asked if he found Kiku attractive, Flynn says, “No. Not at that point.” She gurgles with laughter when she hears this. “I love having someone around me that is not afraid to tell me what he thinks,” she says, eyes shining. “Kevin is the most loyal person. He has incredibly deep convictions, and he just has this inner strength …” She bubbles on, and it’s like a fountain’s been turned on in the middle of a placid lake.
Without benefit of matrimony, the relationship has lasted 12 years.
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For Kiku, the best part of her second marriage (she won’t even talk about the first and third) was Meredith and Kirsten Malone. Now in their twenties, they live in entirely different worlds but are very protective of each other—and of their mom. “She was always there,” Meredith says. “And she always makes things interesting and a little bit different. If she made us lunch, she’d put little notes in there. In first grade, she made my sister into a FedEx package for Halloween.”
Meredith just wanted a store-bought costume; she takes her dad’s witty, stubborn, sturdy approach to the world. She did, though, inherit her mom’s passion for baseball, and she risked a family feud by taking a job with the Milwaukee Brewers. Kirsten, the 20th generation of artists, lives in London and works for her mother’s firm.
Asked for friends who know her well, Kiku either can’t or won’t name any she’s still in touch with. These days, most of her casual friendships link back to work, and her best friends are her daughters. “I talk to them many times a day,” she says. “I really miss all the activity that goes with two girls and their lives. I loved having their friends around; I keep in touch with a lot of them! We are all on Facebook!”
She’s amused by this, not being cute or trying too hard. There’s an ease about Kiku when she talks about her kids, and they say she’s goofy and entirely relaxed only with them. “We always make her laugh and never allow her to take things too seriously,” Meredith explains. “She is a real perfectionist; we always give her a hard time for being the hall monitor in high school.”
“She isn’t good at relaxing,” Kirsten adds, “or taking it easy. The desire to stay busy and try something new sort of runs in our family. Every summer we go to Michigan, and my mother and I spend the whole time making things in my grandmother’s studio. No one just sits by the lake, relaxing.”
So is Kiku’s drive genetic? “Oh no,” says her sister, Nori, who does ceramics and makes glass beads. “I can chill out!”
“She does work an awful lot,” Gen adds.
Their father shrugs: “When I was building up my firm, it took 20 hours a day, and that’s the mode she’s in.”
On a recent trip to Michigan, everybody played around marbling paper one morning, then quit at lunchtime. Kiku stayed in the studio all afternoon and emerged with “22 of the most beautiful marbleized papers I’ve ever seen,” her mother recalls. “She explores everything she does thoroughly.”
She does relax—by finishing the New York Times crossword every Sunday. In ink? She just nods, smiling. “I do have a white-out pen.” She waits a beat. “But I don’t use it very often.”
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According to her daughters, it’s on trips to Glen Arbor, Mich., (where her mom lives, near Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore) that Kiku really lets her guard down. Lately, she’s been dreaming of spending an entire summer, taking time to “just do art and photography and play.” She’s even got her eye on a cottage and barn there, she admits shyly, “but they’re not for sale.”
For now, she surrounds herself with Michigan landscapes and ceramic pieces by Michigan artists. She lives on McKnight Lane in Ladue, in a big white frame house with black shutters that, like Kiku, is warmer and more whimsical than you might expect. Far from minimalist, it’s filled with her grandfather’s exquisite paintings—sumi-e on silk—and her mom’s rugs and handmade boxes, her brother’s paintings, her sister’s ceramics, Leslie Laskey paintings, wall after wall of bookshelves, antique Japanese dolls, a dining set made of twigs, scads of family photos, colorful wooden fishing decoys and a stuffed bear lolling on a chair.
“I just went to Japan for the first time,” Kiku says, leaning forward, “and I understand now where a lot of my thinking comes from. The attention to detail. The love of small things. The love of kitschy weird things. From this reverence for the old—tradition and architecture and people—to this wild sense of modernity.”
Against one bookcase lean three paintings. For some reason, she’s started buying paintings of yellow houses—which she realized only when she carried the most recent one home from a garage sale, pried it out of a hideous frame and found, written on the back by the artist, the name “Yellow House.” Soon after, she called a paper shop in New York to reorder her favorite notebook and found out it was called “Yellow House.”
“I think it’s about a sense of place,” she ventures. “They have this dappled light, this warmth. I’ve been thinking a lot about houses lately. Most of the new work is either Modernist or builders copying an earlier style, and there’s no sense of personality or character. Homes are so personal! There should be much more thought to how they are designed.
“Anyway, all my life I’ve had strange coincidences happen to me. I’ve decided I’m going to act on them.
“I remember the day I hit 30,” she continues, “and I thought, ‘This is really cool. I don’t care what anybody thinks of me anymore.’ Turning 50 has been even more liberating.”
She’s ready to offer her opinions: in retail design, for example, which Thoelke calls “her sweet spot.” Here even Gyo defers, saying, “Retail’s a tough market; you work with developers who think they know everything.” Kiku has patented display designs, received international awards, served on national retail committees. She says shopping satisfies something basic to human nature: the need to be delighted.
“If you are designing a building, how it meets the ground is very important,” she remarks. “If the base is just a band, with the store in cookie-cutter signage, you have created generic, grade-B retail. No detail, drama, no way to allow that retailer to express itself.
“One thing that drives me crazy,” she adds, “is when you see these urban plans and a mile-long street that says ‘retail district.’ You can’t sustain a retail district for a mile. Great retail streets are clusters of two to six blocks—and it’s not doable for Pottery Barn to be on everybody’s plan. Find people who want to start new businesses.”
I ask what else she’d like to speak publicly about. “Name five topics,” I suggest, thinking she’ll hesitate or ask for time to think it through. Nope. She starts rattling them off.
“First, why we should renew our cities. A city should be a really wonderful place to live, and we should invest in homes and streetscapes and buildings. Second, how you create a vision, how you bring people together to understand what they want. Third, retail as an economic driver and how you need to tailor it. Fourth, what makes great places, great streetscapes—the surfaces, the textures, the furniture, orchestrating a sense of character. And fifth”—her voice softens even more—“art in my family. For me, it’s photography, but we all work in different media, both art and craft, which I think are really interlinked.”
Art, architecture, design and craft have surrounded her since she was little, planning to “see every building in the world and go inside and see what the people are doing.” She’s made her start.
“When I was growing up,” Gen says, “people would recognize the name and think of my father. Now, it’s often Kiku they name.”
