James von Klemperer FAIA RIBA is President & Design Principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, where he is responsible for leading a staff of over 650 people in nine global offices.

Since joining KPF in 1983, von Klemperer has planned and designed projects of all scales, from small residential projects to master plans for entire cities. A major focus of his work has been to heighten the role that large developments play in making urban space. He has explored this theme in major projects in Asia including the China Resources Tower in Shenzhen, a 400-meter tall building that anchors the city’s burgeoning Houhai District; the Jing An Kerry Centre in Shanghai, a multi-use complex comprised of retail, hospitality, office, and cultural programming; and the 123-story, mixed-use Lotte World Tower in Seoul – the fifth tallest building in the world.

This commitment to urban place-making is also expressed in his work around the world in such projects as One Vanderbilt in New York City, which will link Midtown’s tallest tower directly to Grand Central Terminal; WINDOW La Défense, a dramatic transformation of an existing office building in Paris; and, at a larger scale, his design for New Songdo City in Incheon, South Korea, which extends this challenge to the scope of urban planning. Each of these projects generates strong symbiotic relationships between program space and the public realm.

von Klemperer has lectured at Harvard, Columbia, Tsinghua, Tongji, Seoul National, and Yonsei Universities, the ESA in Paris, AMO in Lyon, and at Yale, where he has taught as Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor. In 2018, he received the American Prize for Architecture from The Chicago Athenaeum.