Karamuk Kuo: Designing for resilience

By Signe Hansen

Exploring how architecture can endure and evolve, global architecture firm Karamuk Kuo has established a reputation for large-scale projects that balance conceptual innovation with practical resilience. From cultural landmarks to laboratories and schools, the studio develops buildings conceived not as finished objects, but as frameworks ready to adapt to shifting needs. Co-founder Jeannette Kuo discusses the art of designing for change while staying rooted in context.

Founded in Zurich in 2010 by Jeannette Kuo and Ünal Karamuk, Karamuk Kuo Architects has completed cultural, educational, and research buildings across Europe and the US. Behind the company’s success is a genuine urge to reinvent, push boundaries and create buildings that are not just objects, but adaptable and resilient user reflections. Kuo explains: “We always ask: how do we build buildings that stand the test of time, buildings that remain useful and that evolve with their users?”

Recent commissions include the Augusta Raurica Archaeological Center near Basel and the new Rice University Architecture School in Houston, both sustainable projects designed to respond to the dynamic conditions of their users.

The red-brick fabric of the campus resonates in the glazed terracotta panels chosen for the façade of the new Cannady Hall extension. Photo: Iwan Baan

Building in phases

Won through a design competition in 2014, the Augusta Raurica Archaeological Center, located on the edge of one of Europe’s most significant Roman sites, posed unusual challenges. The building had to consolidate archives, laboratories, and offices that were previously dispersed across multiple locations, while also welcoming the public. At the same time, a complex funding structure meant construction could only proceed in phases.

The team answered the phasing requirement with a structural and organisational system, not a fixed object. “The first phase was the workshops, followed by the archives in the second phase where the collections would be,” explains Kuo. “The idea was that the building could theoretically keep growing – maybe even indefinitely – to accommodate the expanding collection.”

This strategy also addressed day-to-day flexibility. Departments can reorganise, add or remove partitions, and maintain clear horizontal connections between units without compromising the building logic. In Kuo’s words, the project was designed “to take the users’ perspective into account in how a building might evolve.” The result is a durable framework that can accept programmatic change, controlled environments for storage, and visibility between specialist workspaces – while remaining ready for future phases as the collection grows.

Karamuk Kuo: Designing for resilience

In the design of the Rosental-Mitte Innovation Labs, an innovative slab system of rigid concrete frames with timber infills was developed, reducing the volume of concrete by more than 50 per cent per floor. This hybrid structure makes the building resilient, serves as a carbon sink, and is also its expressive hallmark. Visualizations by Studio Diode

Karamuk Kuo: Designing for resilience

Rice University School of Architecture

Long recognised for its intimate scale, global outlook, and close ties between education and practice, Rice University’s School of Architecture in Houston had a clear vision when it sent out a call for a global architectural firm to extend its existing facilities. The university’s celebrated 1981 extension by James Stirling was struggling to accommodate contemporary needs, with studios spread across multiple levels and little space left for making and experimenting. The commission for Karamuk Kuo was therefore not only to provide new space, but to bind the ensemble together and strengthen its dialogue with the wider campus.

To achieve this, the new building is physically stitched to the Stirling wing, via a hallway on top of an existing arcade, and the red-brick fabric of the campus resonates in the terracotta rainscreen chosen for the façade. Moreover, the terracotta was selected both for its easy maintenance and demountability. Inside, the logic is equally clear.

“You can see the entire structure. The steel structure, the conduits, the pipes, everything is exposed to allow for adaptation and easy maintenance,” says Kuo and explains that the visibility is more than an aesthetic gesture. “The industrial aesthetic was also to encourage the students to experiment, to not be afraid to get messy, to do bold things and appropriate the spaces for new forms of learning and exchange.”
On the ground floor, a fabrication hall and exhibition space open to the campus, while upper levels weave together collective studios and seminar rooms. Double-height voids allow sightlines and informal exchange, connecting back into Stirling’s existing spaces and forming a continuous environment for teaching and collaboration.

The result is a building which is both sustainable in its assemblies and didactic in its expression – students encounter the anatomy of construction daily, as lessons are inscribed into beams, joints, and spaces.

The industrial aesthetic and exposed structure of the new Cannady Hall is designed to encourage its users, architecture students, to experiment. Photo: Iwan Baan

Web: www.karamukkuo.com
Facebook: karamukkuo
Instagram: @karamukkuo

Karamuk Kuo Architects in short Founded in Zurich in 2010 by Jeannette Kuo and Ünal Karamuk, Karamuk Kuo Architects works across cultural, educational, and research projects, with a portfolio ranging from housing and schools to laboratories and large-scale public institutions. Constituted by 18 team members, the studio is known for its global outlook and its site-specific and user-oriented designs, which balance conceptual clarity with technical precision, often developed in dialogue with complex contexts and long-term adaptability. Both partners also teach internationally; Kuo is Professor of Architecture and Construction at TU Munich.

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