Newly-named Lobby in Campbell Hall honors Kenan Professor Karen Van Lengen’s dedication and inspiring leadership

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(Photo: Dan Addison for UVA Communications)

The UVA School of Architecture announces the naming of Van Lengen Lobby, located at the north entrance to Campbell Hall, honoring Kenan Professor Karen Van Lengen and former dean (1999-2009) as she steps down from the faculty after 26 years at the school, to continue leading her design practice and to focus on her groundbreaking work in sound and architecture. “It is a fitting honor to name the Van Lengen Lobby on behalf of Kenan Professor and former dean Karen Van Lengen who has dedicated 26 years to the School of Architecture,” said Dean Malo A. Hutson. “This is a space that operates as a nexus for our school—and is a place where we gather and build community together both formally and informally. In this way, the newly-named Van Lengen Lobby marks Karen’s remarkable ability to lead by bringing people together across shared vision and collaborative action.”

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 From her MIX House design (with Joel Sanders and Ben Rubin) and the Sound Lounge at the School of Architecture (with Joel Sanders and Jim Welty) to her numerous museum exhibitions of drawings and animations (with Jim Welty) of iconic architectural spaces and landscapes, Van Lengen and her collaborators have carved out a unique advocacy for the sonics of spaces. She has exhibited her art and architecture work in over 40 exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Her website, Soundscape Architecture, describes the ongoing work of Van Lengen and Welty in detail.
 
A New York City architect, Van Lengen came to UVA to serve as the school’s first female dean. She oversaw numerous curricular advancements during this decade-long deanship, building on the school’s established reputation. Working with the Institute for Practical Ethics, she initiated the school-wide conversation on the relation between ethics and aesthetics that became manifested in her program, “Campbell Constructions.” This initiative resulted in the school‘s own faculty creating nearly a dozen new additions and renovations to Campbell Hall. These transformations produced a new spatial world for the school in which interdisciplinary studies could formally and informally flourish. One of her last acts as dean was to establish the Fabrication Lab, recently named the Anselmo G. Canfora Fabrication Lab, that has grown into a transformative resource for students and faculty. In an article for Architect magazine (published in full in print, November 2008), Van Lengen reflected on this tangible legacy, “Not only did we use our own family to make our own space, but we did it in a way that is not about image. It’s about how we live together and develop more dialogue, more innovation, and more opportunities.”

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During her two terms as dean, Van Lengen tripled the endowment, raised the funds for the building additions, all the while facing significant depletions of state resources. She reconstructed the school’s advisory board and created the school’s foundation board, both of which have provided extraordinary opportunities for alumni-student relationships while also building effective resources for the school’s future.
 
Van Lengen also founded “Women’s Work,” a monthly lunch program that supported and sponsored the research work of women faculty on Grounds. This successful decade-long program effectively created an informal University network for women faculty. In 2010, she was awarded the Zintl Leadership Award from the University’s Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center. Van Lengen and Dr. Ariel Gomez (then Vice President for Research and School of Medicine researcher) founded a pan-University initiative to promote ecological studies across Grounds which has flourished in the past 15 years. Together they helped to promote the preservation and study of the many landscapes found on the nearly 7,500 acres of property in Albemarle County, known as Morven, donated to the University of Virginia Foundation for educational and charitable purposes in 2001. During Van Lengen’s ten years as dean, she lived in Pavilion IV, with her husband, the artist Jim Welty, and their daughter Kiri who had the great fortune to spend her early childhood years living in such a remarkable setting.
 
Van Lengen began her architectural career at I.M. Pei & Partners where she became the first female design associate in the firm. She was a member of the design team of the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, the first building to be designed by an American architect after China opened to the west. After a Fulbright fellowship in Rome, Van Lengen opened her own firm, Karen Van Lengen Architects, in New York City, winning several competitions and awards (including the Amerika -Gedenk Bibliothek Competition) while also initiating a teaching career. She chaired the Architecture Department at The New School’s Parsons School of Design where she founded the Design Workshop, a student program to design and build projects in the public realm.

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Van Lengen has given generously to the service of the profession, especially as a jury member for over 70 awards and competitions, most notably, as one of the two American representatives to select the project for the new government center in Berlin, and as a member of the Pentagon Memorial Jury after 9/11. She has authored over 20 publications, including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and two books on themes including architecture, landscape design and sonic studies. Her book, Urgent Matters, published in 2009, documents that 10-year process of renovations, new additions and landscapes built at the grounds of the Architecture School with her own faculty. Her recent scholarship and design work on the sonics of space will be documented in her forthcoming book with Jim Welty, Soundscape Architecture (2025), which introduces their scholarship, writings, and design projects, along with their creative interpretive art works, related to the sounds of spaces.

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As Van Lengen leaves the school to continue her art and design practice, she shared, “I believe that the discipline of architecture and environmental design is dramatically important in today’s world in order to address our climate change challenges and the rebuilding of a communicative public realm.”
 
Van Lengen is a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University where she earned her professional degree in Architecture. She credits her mother with her early interest in the field. Unable to attend architecture school due to her gender, her mother learned to draft in art school and then went on to design and build her childhood home. In addition, Van Lengen’s Vassar architecture studies professor, Jeh V. Johnson, encouraged her to enter the discipline and became a lifelong mentor to her. Her architectural training at I.M. Pei & Partners was nourished by her two mentors there, I.M. Pei and James Ingo Freed.
 
“Karen believes that architecture — and by this, I mean the entire project of physical design — ought to be more engaged with the larger issues of the world,” Robin Dripps, the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture, said. “[She] began the School of Architecture’s commitment to address these issues through a long-term project that she called ‘Urgent Matters.’ After nearly twenty years, this remains a central ethos to the school.”