by: AIA New York
Phu Duong, AIA, AICP, LEED AP, is co-chair of the AIANY Planning and Urban Design Committee and the Founding Principal of Urban X Design LLC. Previously, at the time of this interview, he was a Principal with NBBJ. As an urban designer and architect with over 25 years of domestic and international experience, Duong is passionate about climate and community issues that impact the public realm in cities. His work reimagines the public realm of innovation economies to expand community benefits as healthy inclusive places. Since 2003, Duong has been influencing the next generation of urban designers and architects through teaching appointments at Columbia University, Syracuse University, and Parsons. He is a member of the APA, ULI, and AIANY. He resides in Brooklyn where he served as a member of his local Community Board.
Q: What is influencing your work the most right now?
I’m coming back to the social dimensions of building. The inequities the pandemic exposed expressed the need to repair and address the injustice experienced in our cities. What is in the realm of design and what is a much larger issue in the world? Or how can design connect the latent value in space and place prompting a physical solution for people and the planet? While equity is central to the work in urban design, it’s embedded in processes that engender cultural value synergistic of spatial and socio-economic outcomes. But it also requires architectural imagination: captivating optimism to move masses. Some of the best plans and strategies lie to the wayside, while some of the most compelling images of a future come short on a meaningful inclusive plan. I recognize architecture’s idealism and conceits, and urban design’s pragmatism and often ordinary looking solutions. Both disciplines need each other to tackle the world’s pressing imperatives.
Q: How/why did you decide to pursue architecture?
I have a strong affinity toward place. During my childhood years, I remember admiring a model exhibited in our regional shopping mall displaying Interstate 82 connecting the Tri-Cities, Washington at the confluence of three rivers. It was through architecture school in college that the built environment was a subject of study, and graduate school for urban design, that learning about the American city uncovered a fascinating national growth complex. I entered architecture for its world-making offering that stimulated my imagination. As an immigrant, I knew very little about the perception of the esteemed profession. I’ve enjoyed an everchanging appreciation for architecture through teaching and practice: its meaning and purpose is never at rest.
Q: What are your thoughts on architectural education today?
It’s in primary education where I believe architecture can make a big impact on expanding and diversifying the profession. Creativity and tactility of making is the inclusive cultural gateway here, not reading, writing and math, which for those with learning disabilities can be a welcoming alternative learning path. Architecture empowers and calls-in community making and stewardship values that we all have in common when sharing the neighborhood as children. What if we went beyond the crayon memory map of the community? How would integrating design into a curriculum bridge learning disabilities to draw on creative strengths of young people and support holistic learning potential while also inspiring empowerment futures especially in underserved communities? Exposure to our solutions-based field should happen earlier than high school or college. Programs should lean into the humanistic side of architecture as the technical skills shall follow. And it shouldn’t come at a cost or be outside of the school day for families to access this change-maker career track.
Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges, or opportunities, facing cities today?
Growing distrust may be the biggest challenge cities face. Even as climate change impact, immigration crisis, public health risks, and broad injustices threaten cities, a community’s apprehension towards leadership figures and institutions is the biggest barrier. The institutional breakdown experienced today, erodes at the collective work of improving and maintaining the overall health of the city. This polarization in cities and neighborhoods reenergizes critical dimensions for designers to recognize the extremes in the social terrain of a project site. Remarkably, designers activate their problem-solving optimism and tirelessly come together in creative ways to collaborate.
Q: What are your greatest sources of inspiration?
Technology and ingenuity always inspire me. I still feel the amazement of architecture’s tectonic culture when the dynamics of geometry from façade panel to urban fabric or landscape topography, is both experiential and performs with purpose. It’s the love of the field for how advances in manufacturing and construction modulate form, embrace materiality, and transcend scales. I mean, how ideas drive the conceptualization of zoning, buildings, landscapes, and the infrastructural systems that sustain community life is architectural thought at its best. The range of ability, agility, and personal drive to practice and grow specialized knowledge is profound. We put structures on a warming planet that must be better each time around while engaged in a global dialogue about technology, economy, community, and civilization; contributing to a larger story is extremely inspiring!