Biography

Kyna Leski is a Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She was the Chief Critic of the European Honors Program from 1993-5 and has taught the Architecture, Foundation Studies and Industrial Design departments. Professor Leski was the author of the first semester core architecture design curriculum, given for sixteen years and to over 1500 students. A book on this pedagogy, The Making of Design Principles, was published in 2007. Kyna Leski is a principal of 3SIXØ Architecture in Providence, Rhode Island since its founding in 1997. 3SIXØ’s work includes a house to dwell in—in awe, a church which inspires and expands, a store that contracts itself into a restaurant bar, a salon that extends the life of the city inside and a pedestrian bridge that connects a historic past to today. 3SIXØ has received nine AIA Awards and has been recognized as one of the Architectural Vanguard Firms by Architectural Record in 2002. In 2008, Architectural Record recognized 3SIXØ for “Record Interiors” and Faith and Form awarded their chapel design in 2009. Leski’s project, “Dream House,” placed first in The Japan Architect’s Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1998 and was published in Modern House 2 by Claire Melhuish (Phaidon Press, 2004). In 1997 the Architectural League of New York selected Leski as one of five winners of its annual “Young Architects Competition.” In 2000, she was nominated for the Chrysler Design Awards. She has served as the “City Architect Design Decision Review Advisor” to the Mayor of Providence.

Over the last twenty-two years of teaching, She has closely witnessed projects pursued and developed by students in multiple departments at RISD. The primary focus of her teaching research is the creative process and its workings across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Currently, she is writing a book that focuses on the design mind.

She is a competitive rower who can be found most mornings before dawn on the Seekonk River and Narragansett Bay in Providence.

Academic Research/Areas of Interest

I see myself as a researcher of the creative process. Although “creative” and “process” are neither creative and are more processed than process. I think of it as coheringentropy. A creative work makes its own necessity by cohering what wasn’t before and now we don’t want undone. Cohering by recognizing connections from the astronomical to the metabolic, by putting together what precedes, follows and is next to: coherence gathered, and meaning made.

Kyna Leski

Professor
kleski@risd.edu
401-454-6281

• BARC, The Cooper Union
• MA2, Harvard University

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