Painting the Town

He's known better as founder and chairman of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, but it was painting that first triggered architect Eugene Kohn's imagination.

Annie Block, Mark McMenamin, and Meghan Edwards -- Interior Design, 9/1/2011 6:40:00 PM

He's known better as founder and chairman of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, but it was painting that first triggered architect Eugene Kohn's imagination. As a child, he spent time observing his mother, Hanna, an established artist who later marked her 100th birthday, in 2002, with a show at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The younger Kohn estimates that he's produced 1,000 watercolors since then-from abstracts and landscapes to the cityscapes one might expect from a master builder.

Making art of course allows Kohn to indulge in the immediate gratification notoriously lacking in architecture. Most of the results are given as gifts or donated for charity events, such as an October 3 sale and silent auction benefiting Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, cancer research at the University of Michigan, and the Hong Kong Cancer Fund. The choice of that final recipient as well as the venue, the Hongkong Land Rotunda, underscores China's prominence in KPF's global portfolio.