Fab 5: E.B. Min
Photo by Jeff Fassnacht
It was a close call—E.B. Min almost walked away from architecture altogether. A former pre-med student, she pivoted in college, earning a degree with concentrations in art history and studio art as a cross-register student at Brown University and RISD before completing her Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley. Early in her career, though, she seriously considered going back to finish her pre-med requirements and pursuing medical school.
“I was feeling very pessimistic about architecture,” recalls E.B.—the abbreviation of her first and middle names, coined by a college friend. “My jobs ranged from OK to terrible, and I never quite felt like I fit.” Then came her third role, at San Francisco–based landscape architecture firm Delaney and Cochran. Mentored, challenged, and trained by the firm’s two female founders, her perspective on the profession did a complete 180.
Since then, the Korean American architect has firmly made her mark. She launched Min Design in 2003, intentionally building a studio comprising mainly women architects and designers from diverse ethnic backgrounds. While serving on the board of AIA San Francisco, E.B. also helped establish the Missing 32% (now Equity by Design), an initiative born of a simple but unsettling question: If women make up 50% of architecture school graduates, why are only 18% licensed architects? What happened to the other 32%? What began as a one-day symposium evolved into a broader movement for equity in architectural practice.
Today, Min Design’s work spans architecture, landscape design, and art, with a range of clients, project types, and scales that keep things anything but predictable. Fascinating in her own right, E.B. shares her inspirations, advice, and a few thoughtful musings in our Fab 5.