From the Ground Up

PHOTO:  Karen Kubey in front of her design team’s “Aging Against the Machine” exhibition installation at the Center for Architecture in New York. (Photo Credit Alan Kubey)

By Juna Brothers

BlueDevilHUB.com Staf––

Karen Kubey credits some of her success as an architectural designer and researcher from the strong foundations established in her time at Davis Senior High. Graduating in 1998, Kubey’s proficiency in math and the arts made a career in architecture appealing.  

“I feel extremely lucky to have grown up in Davis,” Kubey said. “The quality of education that we received at a public school is really phenomenal. I didn’t realize how rare that was until I left.” 

Kubey majored in architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. An early assignment for her Environmental Design 1 class was to walk through affluent and impoverished neighborhoods in Oakland and examine the public spaces. The social inequality of housing and design was made abundantly clear to Kubey.

After receiving an undergraduate degree, Kubey moved to New York City. Once a month, Kubey would meet with other young architectural designers at a bar to discuss social issues in their field. Inspired, the small group founded the first local chapter of the nonprofit organization Architecture for Humanity (now Open Architecture/New York). She then completed a graduate degree in architecture from Columbia University. 

Kubey extended her architectural knowledge into the broader field of urbanism—a field at the intersection of housing, urban design, and social justice. She recently edited a collection of essays examining the use of housing projects and the design processes behind them as tools for greater social equity. 

As the recipient of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship, Kubey is currently spending a semester in Argentina teaching at the University of Torcuato Di Tella, exploring equity and design in an Argentine context. “I’ve only been here for two weeks, but I love it here…there’s a lot of interesting work going on here, but it’s not as well known as it should be.” 

Still, Kubey hasn’t forgotten her Davis roots. An active member of the jazz choir, Kubey was inspired by her choir and music theory teacher, Kirsten Hedegaard, who was given an emergency teaching license to temporarily replace the previous teacher on maternity leave. Hedegaard is now a conductor at Loyola University Chicago. 

“(Karen) was such an intelligent, thoroughly committed student,” Hedegaard said. “I am not at all surprised at her success.”