J. Meejin Yoon

Meejin Yoon is the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University and cofounding partner of Höweler + Yoon. An architect, designer, and educator, Yoon advances creative and critical practices, pedagogies, scholarship, and research to address the many urgent environmental and social challenges we face in our cities and communities.

Yoon’s design research examines intersections between architecture, urbanism, technology, and the public realm. Yoon directs the Design Across Scales Lab which examines technology and territory broadly to explore the spatial implications and possibilities of architectures and infrastructures on urbanism, the built environment, and public space. 

Yoon’s practice, Höweler + Yoon, is a design-driven architecture and urbanism practice whose work is deeply informed by social and cultural context. Recent projects include cultural and institutional buildings and public spaces such as the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers and Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia, the Collier Memorial and MIT Museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Yale Living Village, a regenerative living and learning community.

Yoon has exhibited at venues such as MoMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Vitra Design Museum, the National Art Center in Japan, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others. She is co-author of Verify in Field: Projects and Conversations Höweler + Yoon (Park Books, 2021) and Public Works: Unsolicited Small Projects for the Big Dig (Map Books, 2009); and author of Absence, an artist book published by Printed Matter and the Whitney Museum of Art in 2003.

Yoon received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 1995 and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1997. In 2022, Yoon received the World Cultural Council Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts, and in 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.