Grace Kim

Grace Kim is an American architect who is founding principal of Schemata Workshop, an architecture firm in Seattle, Washington that works toward the improvement of communities. She has focused in her career on the topics of cohousing, mentorship, and alternative housing models for seniors and those with disabilities. She is the author of The Survival Guide to Architectural Internship and Career Development, a work described as demystifying the architectural internship process. In 2008, she received the National AIA Young Architect Award. She is currently a commissioner of the Seattle Planning Commission.

Early life and education Kim earned her B.Arch from Washington State University and her M.Arch from the University of Washington. Prior to starting Schemata Workshop, Kim interned at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM).

Career highlights and design rationale Kim is perhaps most well known for her teachings on cohousing. During her early architectural practice years in the late 90s, she researched the Cohousing typology in Denmark. Kim spoke in Vancouver at an April 2017 TED talk on the topic of cohousing. In this TED talk, she asserted that cohousing can make us happier through an intentionality on relationships that can work as an antidote to isolation. She states:Cohousing starts with a shared intention to live collaboratively, and intention is the single most important characteristic that differentiates cohousing from any other housing model...This intention has been expressed in some of the communities I've visited in the careful selection of furniture, lighting, and acoustic materials to support eating together; in the careful visual location and visual access to kids' play areas around and inside a common house; and in the consideration of scale and distribution of social gathering nodes in and around the community to support our daily lives. All of these spaces help contribute to and elevate the sense of communitas—the spirit of community—in each community. Kim began putting these ideas on cohousing into practice in developing Capitol Hill Cohousing, a five-story mixed-use cohousing project in Seattle that features nine 2-3 bedroom homes oriented around a central courtyard on a 4500 ft2 urban infill lot in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood of Seattle. Key communal features of the project include shared balconies, a community dining hall and kitchen, and a collective rooftop garden. The result is a building that, for many residents and visitors, feels very alive. She was involved in the project from ideation through completion—from approximately 2007 to 2016—as a kind of architect-developer and consensus builder, helping clients and project stakeholders envision how a completed project will be experienced.

Additional Work with Schemata St. Francis House, Seattle, 2021 Capital Hill TOD, Settle, 2020 R&D Interbay, Seattle, 2017 Waterton Mixed-Use, Seattle, 2017 Uptown 11 Mixed-Use, Seattle, 2016 Sola 16, Seattle, 2016 Kirkland Avenue Modular, Renton, WA, 2015