Q&A: Shirley Blumberg and Marianne McKenna on Their 2025 RAIC Gold Medal Win

It’s wonderful. For Marianne and I to have been recognized at the same time, it breaks all precedent, but it is really consistent with who we are as KPMB. When we founded the firm about 38 years ago, we looked at other firms that we thought we could learn from in terms of how we set up our practice. It was always based on the collaborative mind, but also kind of hybridized and somewhat ambiguous — which I think has served us really well, because we’ve been able to adjust and pivot as things change in the world around us. I think the reason why we’ve had such longevity is that we fundamentally share the same values and vision for architecture. So even though Marianne and I work on different projects, we’re working within the collective of KPMB and are very close partners.

Awards like this give you a chance to look back, reflect on where you’ve come from, and acknowledge how far you’ve come. I’m a girl from Montreal, and I left Quebec because I knew I didn’t have a future there with an Anglo name. Shirley is a girl from South Africa in very troubled times. But to whom much is given, much is expected, and I think Shirley felt that too. If you are offered these opportunities, you bloody well better do something great with the life that you’re living and make the world around you better for the people that are living in it with you.

I think it’s also important to note that we are being recognized individually. We’re both drivers of this practice with unique points of view. We share the commonality of our platform, and we have built this firm together with Bruce [Kuwabara]. On one hand, you don’t mind being teamed with your female partner, but on the other hand, we each do our projects distinctively and separately. It’s important to acknowledge that.

What it means is that more women are building successful careers, and there’s more gender balance. I think that is a fantastic thing. For the longest time, Shirley and I have agreed that we never wanted to be called women architects. We were just architects. We never saw ourselves as victims and we didn’t see the discrimination. We worked with our partners to be equals, to meet all the demands and to excel. It’s really important that women see more women in architectural leadership, and that it becomes the norm — because it should be normal. It’s abnormal that it was abnormal for such a long time.

It’s a step in the right direction. I was born and raised in South Africa, where there were no female role models whatsoever in the profession. While we’ve made great progress in many respects, I think it’s still a very uneven playing field. Given that we are half of the world’s population, it’s a really good idea to include women as much as possible in how we make our built environment. And that’s also why I co-founded BEAT, because at the time we founded it in 2015, 50 per cent of our students were women, but they only represented 23 per cent of the working profession. By providing a grassroots network, and mentorship, and the ability for women to have role models, and promoting women in design and celebrating design excellence, in just 12 years, the stats of 2022 showed a 12 per cent increase in retention. That’s pretty amazing. Hopefully this year’s award will further the course. I hope we’ll continue to see many more women recognized.

In architecture, it takes decades to find your voice. It doesn’t just happen overnight. I think Marianne and I found our voices in similar, yet different aspects of architecture. The great thing about architecture is that everything in your life, what you think, what you believe, all your experience goes into the work. Marianne and I have very different backgrounds. She has amazing energy, and she’s done great work in performing arts — the Royal Conservatory of Music, Massey Hall. She’s managed to excel in that type of project as well as many others. Whereas for me, I’m very interested in affordable housing, for example.

Bruce, Marianne and I are all quite different, but together, we’re very complimentary. We’ve never voted in terms of decisions, we always discuss things. We’re like siblings — we’re not afraid to argue with each other and then come to a solution. It just means you’ve thought it through more thoroughly. They’ve kept me on my game.

I admire Shirley’s tenacity and her toughness. I’ve watched her as a leader, and we’ve both been able to attract and coalesce team members around us. It’s important to have that loyalty and create an environment of support and encouragement. As a woman, you know you can’t do it all on your own. Everyone in the office has really embraced our process, which allows everyone to give an opinion, but in the end, one of us is going to make the final decision, because you need a leader.

Leadership is very important, and that’s been something that we had to learn at the very beginning of the practice. We’ve had terrific advice around managing a practice, and this isn’t something they teach you in architecture school. One of our advisors recommended a book called Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren Bennis, who is a management consultant. He gives you the five points of being a leader, and one of them is that you don’t always need to share the bad news. Be discreet in the information you share in order to support and encourage your team. We learned important lessons from that book, and we also learned to recognize when each other were doing it.

But on a broader lever, the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that ideas matter, and they can change the world. It’s important to engage with your client, because they are part of the team as well, draw them into the narrative and ask them, what’s the story here? They can big advocates. In a practice where you are a leader, you have to be able to generate those ideas. And at first that felt intimidating, but if you research and you talk to people, ideas come to you. They’re out there in the air. And soon you realize, oh gosh, I’m not the only one thinking this. Being able to, through architecture, grab that idea and catalyze it into a building, it’s crazy wonderful. What a privilege.

As architects, we respond to the times we’re living in. And over the 38 years we’ve been in practice, there have been many changes. I think the lessons to me are to find your voice, believe in what you value, and then, do work that aligns with those values, whether it’s through the design of the buildings, mentoring younger people, activism or leadership in the community. It’s at every level. When you get alignment between a client and the architect, it’s a really exhilarating process and I’m fortunate that we’ve had some amazing clients. When 150 Dan Leckie Way opened, a community housing project on the waterfront, people were moving in, and my project architect was on site. He overheard one of the residents say to another, “This building has changed my life.” It doesn’t get any better than that. That’s what I’m in it for. There’s a quote by Thoreau, which I like a lot: “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.” That’s what we do as architects.

They say, when you get older, if you’re lucky, you’ll become the child you used to be. I think the impact of growing up in South Africa left a huge impression on me. I’ve been involved in activism to a certain degree. Years ago, I was invited to be on the jury for the Memorial for the Victims of Communism, which was supposed to be sited next to the Supreme Court. I thought it was so outrageous that I worked very vigorously, not to stop them building a memorial, just not on that site. We had to file an injunction with the federal court, but we won, and they found a more appropriate site in the Garden of the Provinces. I’ve also done a lot of work in terms of trying to protect heritage in the city. We’re citizens first, and architects second, and as such, I think we have a duty and an obligation to the public good. That’s what we try to engender in our projects as much as we can.

From where I began to the work I’m doing now, each project has been a defining moment. I’m currently working on the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre, which brings together everything that I’ve been thinking about and learning for 38 years. This project reminds me why I am an architect and has allowed me to actualize what I’ve learned through a lifetime of practice. It’s about urbanity, about public realm, about a building that speaks to a community — not only the city of New Haven, but the campus. So it’s very important how the building relates to the street, not only in its urbanity, its transparency, but it is also important that it feels at a pedestrian scale. It’s been an opportunity to explore materiality and sustainability — because this building will be net-zero ready. It will be a state of the art building, built from the ground up. It’s a lot of responsibility, but I have to be ready for it. The defining moment of my career may be one of my ultimate, and perhaps one of the last big projects that I do.

My vision is just to keep going. We’ve been through ups and downs, but we’ve always strived through the down times. It brings us together as a group and sets us up for really great adventures. COVID was one example. Within 48 hours, we were set up to do remote work, and our firm grew by 20 people during that time.

I think about the future, not just in terms of my future or the founding partners’ future, but the future of KPMB. We’ve created a culture here that has evolved with all the things we’ve learned about diversity, equity and inclusion, about sustainability, about redefining what urbanity is, and making a protest through the work that you do. As far as succession planning, it’s about making sure that the next generation appreciates that architecture is a co-creation with our clients. It’s not something you can do on your own. Most of the people that are now partners have been around for almost 20 years, and we made new partners five years ago. But it takes them time. It’s so important to promote people, and we now understand why we wouldn’t do anything but that. Part of the job is trying to help our future leaders find who they are, because we’ve had the incredible privilege of self-actualization in our own work. I have the Yale project (I’m a graduate of Yale, and my brother went to Yale as well), Shirley is doing the Holocaust Museum in Montreal, and Bruce is doing the memorial to Japanese internment on the west coast. Each of these projects for each of us is deeply personal. None of us think this is the end, but it sure is one hell of a benchmark. Not many people get that opportunity.

Architects are more relevant now than ever, given the challenges of the climate emergency, social equity and so on. Our skill set, our design thinking, can take two opposing issues and resolve them into a solution that actually moves both forward and reconciles them. It’s a much more synthetic way of working, and I think that’s what’s needed right now. We can really be very instrumental in mitigating climate change and issues of equity, and that’s very exciting to me.

I’ve led the DEI initiatives that we’re doing at the firm, because not only is architecture still a boys club, it’s also not very diverse, and that needs to change. We also started a lab at KPMB some time ago to research architecture’s impact on the environment, and we’ve increased our focus as we went from understanding that operational carbon is a problem, to then understanding that embodied carbon is a problem, and have dramatically intensified our efforts in each and every project in terms of carbon reduction. It’s been a huge effort and a learning curve for all of us. Because we’re always solving problems, the way we look at things is, how can we turn that challenge into an opportunity?