Building on her past

Karen Cook fired up the computer in the London office of Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, the international architectural firm where she is a principal partner. Her PowerPoint presentation is about the triangular Danube House, which she designed as the first and tallest in a series of buildings in a new urban neighborhood in Prague.

Screen after screen shows the handsome building that houses offices as well as public spaces, restaurants, cafes and parking. Opened as a retail space in 2003, it has been praised for being both contemporary and for honoring the medieval style of the city’s historic district. Particularly notable are the building’s environmental principles, in which design and technology work together for a more energy-efficient structure with plentiful outdoor light sources and an innovative air-flow system.

In a conference room at the office, a renovated vegetable warehouse in the heart of London’s bustling theater district, Cook described an image of an inner, light-filled lobby of the Danube House. It features a decorative reflecting pool as well as a group of columns that do not seem to hold up or bolster anything in particular. Most people entering the building may not be consciously aware that the columns represent anything other than structural elements. But workers and visitors to the building may have some distant sense of recognition, something they cannot quite name but that causes them to feel at home, to relax, to breathe a bit more freely.

It could just be the superior ventilation. More likely, however, the columns remind passersby of an elegant stand of trees, not too unlike the ones you might see in Maine or the ones outside Cook’s childhood home in Stillwater. Early in life, said Cook, she formed backyard impressions of nature that followed her through Old Town High School to Rice University, where she studied art and architecture, then to her first job as a junior architect in New York City, to graduate school at Harvard University and to helping open and now overseeing one of London’s most prestigious and successful architectural firms. Cook currently has several projects in France, and has worked in the U.S., Germany, England, Cyprus, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, where her Danube House has won a dozen awards, among them the Urban Land Institute Award for Excellence.

Cook is also leading the design for Bishopsgate Tower, a 55-story building that could become one of the most defining structures in the skyline of London’s financial district.

Architectural details such as the column of trees at Danube House or the fishlike glass skin surrounding the exterior of the Bishopsgate Tower proposal arise from Cook’s own sense of her childhood environment in Maine.

“The Maine references that make their way into my projects include aspects of nature that can be reinterpreted, such as the columns that give the sense that trees enter the building in Prague,” said Cook, a lanky, refined woman with a friendly voice. “On the tall building, not yet built in London, there are other references that are not in my mind until the design is happening, and I realize that analogies can be made to my personal references.”

Diagonal braces that resemble weirs Cook has seen in the Bay of Fundy, or a glass skin of an exterior overlapping like a lobster tail or a canopy structure that evokes deciduous trees might all find their origins in a window-filled home on a remote, woodsy property on Bennoch Road where Cook lived as a girl.

Her mother Betty, a biologist and teacher, still lives in the house, which she and her late husband, also a biologist, had built in 1967. The family home was built by Cooper Milliken, a local architect whose work has been compared to works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto.

“I have many memories of being in the house and out in the field or woods,” said Cook, who was 5 when it was finished. She speaks of the place with a mix of nostalgia and professional amazement. Milliken, she said, has been underrated. As a girl, she had the unique experience of traveling each day between the house he built, and Herbert Sargent Elementary School, which he also built. “I formed a certain feeling about architecture, that buildings should make you feel good,” she said.

Even earlier than age 5, however, Cook’s talent began to show. Her parents noticed that when she was 3, Cook began piling building blocks so securely that they didn’t tumble over. “You’re going to be an engineer,” her mother told her. But when Karen was in 7th grade, she announced another plan: She wanted to be an architect.

That same determination stood out to Milliken, who is 87 and lives in Stillwater not far from the Cook family home. “Quite marvelous,” said Milliken describing Cook’s professional drawings and photos – the only part of her work he has seen. Her former art teacher, Harriet Young, who lives in Old Town, said her student of seven years was “very alert and very good at anything she did. She was in it to go to the top.”

While Young and Milliken gave guidance early on in Cook’s life, Lee Polisano, president of Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, helped transfer her ambitions to a professional realm.

“We always look for talent,” said Polisano. He hired Cook as a summer intern, then as a junior architect and eventually made her partner. “In our business, talent is absolutely essential. Part of that talent is also an ability to process complex issues and come up with creative solutions. These are qualifications Karen possessed from the beginning. It helps that she came from a family of scientists. She was quite sharp, very bright, a fast learner who was not short on opinions.”

Those skills, plus speaking French and German, made Cook particularly attractive when the New York firm decided to open a European office in 1990. Cook was one of 10 associates and the only woman sent to London to get things going. Since then, KPF has expanded to 135 employees from 30 countries. Cook, who is responsible for much of the hiring, is one of two women partners among 15. These days, women make up 40 percent of the architectural staff.

“I do my part by hiring competent people, including women,” said Cook, who is 43 and lives in London. “Usually I try to avoid discussing women in architecture because it signifies that there should be a distinction, and that for me is the first step toward segregation and discrimination. I am an architect. I am a woman. But I am not fixated on being a woman architect.”

Polisano, however, raised the issue as a point of historical celebration. Architecture has been the reserve of men, he said. Talented women such as Cook are changing that.

“Karen became a part of our culture and an important asset to our culture because of her desire to achieve success and look for excellent solutions,” said Polisano. “I don’t think you should undersell the accomplishments of a woman becoming a partner in one of the leading architectural firms in the world. Generally, you don’t find many women at firms at the partnership level.”

But there was never any doubt in the minds of her parents, said Betty Cook, that either of their daughters – Karen has a younger sister, Rebecca, who is an actor and writer – would do anything but succeed.

For Karen, that meant leaving the state.

“Maybe one reason I didn’t move back to New England is that very rarely do you find people willing to go beyond brick boxes,” said Cook. “But there was always the idea growing up that we would leave Maine for school. It wasn’t necessarily taken for granted that we would come back.”

Cook does come back, however, for vacations and to visit a small piece of coastal property she purchased a few years ago. She dreams of someday building her own home there. In the meantime, it’s Paris and Dusseldorf, Prague and London. It wasn’t just hunting and fishing trips with her father, reading books, and taking the time with her family to be close to the trees, open spaces and marine life that inspired her when she was a girl, she said. Her upbringing taught her to seek out the adventures of other places and other cultures, and to share her own sensibilities to – as she wrote in her application to Rice – “make the world a better place.”

Maine also taught her the very self-sufficiency she has embraced as a lifestyle, she says.

“My independence and my pride come from Maine,” she says. “Mainers are proud people. They don’t like to be told what to do. And I have a sense of doing things the right and honest way.”

Architect Mies van der Rohe famously pronounced: “God is in the details.” Although she may not always explain it quite this way, Cook might also add that Maine is in the detail, too.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.