Architect Billie Tsien on identity, fear and doing Duolingo

I’M A FIRST-GENERATION Chinese-American. My parents left Shanghai in 1948 to go to grad school at Cornell. When I was born (in 1949), my grandfather gave me a Chinese name that my mother (a biochemist) said sounded like Billy. She didn’t like its meaning because it was too flowery, so she gave me a Chinese name that basically means “good money”, which is not very romantic. But to respect my grandfather’s wishes, she gave me the American name Billie, which is unusual even in America.

WHEN I WAS trying to think of a name for my son, I got talking to my mother. I liked the Hawaiian word “kai”, which is “the surface of the ocean”, and she said, “Oh, that’s something very unusual.” I thought she was telling me his name meant “something very unusual”. But then she said, “Why did you name him Kai?” It doesn’t mean “something very unusual”. Tod (Williams, co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects) had worse ideas for names. His idea was “Wrench”, so against that, Kai sort of won.

Kai (now an industrial designer) grew up in the studio. We took him to construction sites. We took him travelling. He says, when he was at school, he would be looking under the table at how the table was made. His friends would say they didn’t understand what he was doing. He was really just expressing the way he grew up, which is that you look at things, you try to understand them. I think children of people who are in any way connected to design end up looking at the world in a different way than other children do.

IN MANY WAYS, psychologically, I’m very Chinese. I’ve learned to be less reticent because, in the kind of work that I do, I need to connect to people and be able to speak. But essentially, I’m more an internal kind of person. When I get angry, I stay angry for a long time, but I become silent. I think of those things as somewhat Chinese. But culturally I’m so American, and I have no cultural references that are Chinese. So I’m neither here nor there.

MY MOTHER DIED two and a half years ago, and I realised that that was my last physical family connection to China. I have two brothers, who were also born in the United States. None of us can speak Chinese, and so I started doing Duolingo. I’m under no illusion that I’m going to learn to speak Chinese from Duolingo, but every morning I touch base with thinking about my mother and thinking about what it is that connects me to being Chinese. I’m the oldest and I always say that the oldest Chinese daughter is one of the most responsible people in the world. So I think my parents were confident that somehow or other I would figure out a way to be responsible. I’m starting my own studio – I’ve already begun (this year) – which is a little crazy at my age. It’s called Studio Tsien. I have two partners, we have four people working for us and we have three new projects.

MY SENSE OF architecture came from reading stories and imagining settings for stories. At school, you’d have a shoebox and you’d make a little diorama. It was an odd way of backing into architecture, because it wasn’t generated from an idea of wanting to draw a building or make a space. It was generated from reading a story and wanting to make a place for the story to happen. I didn’t understand architecture as a profession until I was in college and had a great architectural history professor named Vincent Scully. I suddenly started to see there was such a thing as architecture, where you had an intention about a building, and that intention was expressed through the building. After that, I went to architecture school at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles). Having had an undergraduate degree in fine arts, I found architecture such a relief because it’s not a singular profession. It can’t be done by one person, unless it’s theoretical. It’s always collaborative.