Excerpted from an article by Tom Nugent, courtesy of Nebraska Magazine and the Nebraska Alumni Association.
After more than four decades of designing residential projects, sports facilities, campus master plans, waterfront development enterprises and even entire towns and large cities, Scott Killinger (B.Arch. ’61) says he’s “having more fun than ever” as an international architecture guru who specializes in planning new housing and commercial buildings in the rapidly expanding world of contemporary China.
A former faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Design, and the winner of numerous regional design awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the tireless Killinger launched (along with a savvy Chinese partner) the now-flourishing Kuang Xing Design International architectural firm in Beijing.
With 45 on-site employees in the Chinese capital – and with a client list that includes some of the country’s largest companies and local governments – Kuang Xing today manages more than 30 major architectural and urban design projects throughout southern and eastern China.
ABOVE ALL, A PROBLEM-SOLVER
A former managing partner at several of Philadelphia’s best-known architecture firms, Killinger has spent most of his long career working in the City of Brotherly Love.
But his professional travels have often taken him far from Pennsylvania ... to places as remote as Caracas (where he designed an entire university campus) and Singapore (he built the country’s largest racetrack) and even Saudi Arabia (his team of designer-planners put together 13 different residential projects for energy giant ARAMCO at Dhahran in the Arabian desert).
Armed with master’s degrees in architecture and city planning from the University of Pennsylvania, Killinger long ago established himself as an architect with an uncanny talent for assembling urban projects that require the designer to smoothly coordinate the interactions of dozens of different people, including building contractors, government regulators, venture capitalists and potential residents, to name but a few.
Instead of being intimidated by so much buzzing complexity, however, Killinger positively thrives on it.
“I think the most important thing you need to be able to do as an architect is to figure out solutions to complex problems,” he said. “In a very real way, designing and planning a building – or even a community – is like putting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle. When the puzzle is finished it must have assembled the pieces in a way that both inspires and delights the occupants.”
NEBRASKA MENTORS MADE THE DIFFERENCE
Born and raised in Hebron, Scott Killinger signed on as an architecture student at UNL back in the fall of 1956 – and soon discovered that most of his professors were also “problem-solvers” who believed that finding creative solutions was the key to the craft.
“I was pretty lucky because I wound up with many gifted teachers including Dale Gibbs and Patrick Horsburgh as mentors,” he recalls today. “At one point Patrick presented us with a challenge that required us to ‘figure it out’ in a big way.
“He asked us to choose one of three environments – the Arctic Circle, or a tropical rain forest, or a desert environment – and then figure out the best kind of housing structure that could be built there. Well, I chose the rain forest ... and I ended up designing a series of housing units that were built at the top of the trees. That was very ‘mind-stretching’ to imagine the life of the people who would inhabit those structures.
“I remember spending many late nights in the Architecture Building with my never-go-to-bed classmates, sitting over our drawing boards – with [jazzman] Dave Brubeck playing in the background – while we drank endless cups of coffee and tried to figure out how to build the perfect housing structure for that kind of environment.”
After earning his UNL architecture degree in 1961, Killinger worked briefly in New York, then settled in Philadelphia and soon began to specialize in the kind of architecture and urban design work that has lately taken him deep into the world of China’s burgeoning cities.
As a founding partner of the rapidly expanding Kuang Xing design firm in Beijing, he spent the past several years getting a hawk’s-eye view of the amazing transformation that is now overtaking all of Chinese society.
“China is truly a remarkable place,” he says with a note of awe in his voice. “I go back there six or seven times each year, and I work there for weeks at a stretch. Everywhere you look, these days, you see skyscrapers and new cities springing up like mushrooms.
EXPOSING UNL ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS TO CHINESE CULTURE
The Chinese are going to have to house more than 300 million people in the next 15 or 20 years – as the rural farmers increasingly move into the cities – and meeting that immense need is going to be a major theme in international architecture during the next few decades.
“The challenges you face in building housing or commercial structures in China are truly profound,” says the design guru with a shake of his grizzled head. “I’m very fortunate to have a skilled Chinese partner, because I’ve given up the idea that I will ever fully understand all the nuances and subtleties of Chinese culture.
“What I try to do is to learn as much as I can about the people for whom I’m building new housing units or office space or waterfront developments. And that’s a wonderfully challenging enterprise, believe me. But I also think it’s vitally important – because we’re now entering a new, global world of commerce, and the Chinese are going to play a huge part in that. And there’s no doubt that we need to begin learning much more about them, if we’re going to keep up.”
Intent on spreading the gospel about new business and architectural opportunities in China, Killinger has sponsored UNL students in the country’s third-largest city, Tianjin. Here they studied local building practices and local culture for a semester with their Chinese counterparts in the architecture department at Tianjin University.
“I think that kind of interaction will be absolutely essential for success in the world of architecture in the years ahead,” he says. “As a former UNL student who feels very grateful about the education he got there, I’m delighted to be part of a [now-permanent] program that encourages such cultural bridge-building.”
Like Killinger, UNL Associate Dean of Architecture Mark Hoistad is convinced that programs such as the one in Tianjin are now an essential part of education in his field.
Says Hoistad: “The work Scott Killinger is doing in China with our students is enormously helpful to them, and we’re very excited about the urban design program he’s created there. Scott is a highly accomplished architect in his own right, but with a special area of expertise in this kind of international urban design.