The landscape architect Sir Peter Shepheard was dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts when Steve Kieran and James Timberlake were students in the architecture program in the mid-1970s. Timberlake recalls him attending student juries, where he would sit and “draw these beautiful renderings of fowl—mallard ducks. There would be groups of students watching the jury, but then there would be a whole pile of students right behind Peter watching him illustrate this duck.”

He cites Shepheard as one source of KieranTimberlake’s interest in landscape architecture, but names as principal mentors Dr. Peter McCleary, then chair of the department—“an influence from the standpoint of his background as a structural engineer teaching in the architecture department”—and the late Steve Izenour GAr’65. Izenour taught both partners and also introduced them to Robert Venturi Hon’80 and Denise Scott Brown GCP’60 GAr’65 Hon’94, in whose firm he was an associate (and with whom he co-authored the seminal Learning From Las Vegas in 1972).

Kieran and Timberlake had crossed paths at Penn, but it was while working at Venturi Rauch and Scott Brown, as the firm was then called, that they became friends and, eventually, began “moonlighting together,” says Kieran. (“Much to the chagrin of Bob and Denise—and you can print that,” throws in Timberlake.)

In the early 1980s, both won the prestigious Rome Prize, Kieran in 1980-81 and Timberlake in 1981-82, which brings with it a year-long fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. They established their practice in 1984. “We had small projects—residential renovations, a jewelry store, a car dealership, the typical fare for young architects,” recalls Kieran, but from the beginning they were determined “to have a plan—not just take what came our way but go get what we wanted to do.”

High on that list was work for educational and cultural institutions, which make up the bulk of their client list today. Besides Penn, their current projects for academic clients include four residential college renovations at Yale University; a three-building complex at Middlebury College, “very much an extension of the landscape of Vermont,” that includes residences and a dining hall that will be naturally ventilated, with a green, planted roof on the dining hall; five buildings at Sidwell Friends School, an independent school in Washington, that also has a “very strong sustainable agenda,” with natural ventilation, green roofs, and solar collectors; and a study for Stanford University, their first project in California, to look at several existing buildings with an eye toward creating a “a more comprehensive and cohesive student commons/union area.”

But “12 or 13 years passed with us really sort of struggling, going after commissions and so forth, before the work began to resonate and folks trusted us with buildings at scale,” says Timberlake. In the firm’s early years, they avoided architectural competitions, feeling that “doing a lot of drawing work” was less important than actually building something.

“We are very much hands-on,” says Kieran. “We don’t know how to think without making.” This “passion for putting things together,” he says, threads through their work up to and including Levine Hall “—and continues to evolve,” adds Timberlake. “It’s an interest in materials, and an interest in how things work—tectonics, as architects like to put it—and it’s a core philosophy within the work.”

They take the same holistic view of managing their firm, which now includes about 50 employees in an airy, loft-like space they designed—formerly the studio of a local television station—located a few blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rather than a clear division of labor, in which, for example, there is one “business” partner and one “design” partner, Kieran says, “underlying the model we went after, for better or worse, was a belief that you can’t segregate the world that way and have good buildings and happy people in the end. As imperfect as we all are in our skills, we still need to do it all.”