By Brittany McCandless (HS'08)

It’s late afternoon in December, and the light outside is waning. Inside Carnegie Mellon’s Margaret Morrison Hall, Yen Ha doesn’t notice. There is still work to be done. She has traveled here from New York City to help critique end-of-semester concept projects by second-year architecture majors. Alongside Ha is Michi Yanagishita, her business partner and former college roommate. This isn’t the first time the two principals of Front Studio have volunteered to assess student designs since earning their own degrees here in 1996. Frankly, they love Pittsburgh and welcome any chance to return.

But right now, location is irrelevant. They’re focused on the task at hand. After sitting for hours, Ha tells Yanagishita she needs a pick-me-up and heads out for coffee. She makes it to the front stairwell before she’s stopped by Arthur Lubetz (A’63), the architecture professor whose class she has spent the day evaluating. Turns out, he has something on his mind besides her input.

“I need you to do me a favor,” he says bluntly. “Find me a partnership in New York.” Ha is startled; her former professor has a well-established Pittsburgh firm, Lubetz Associates, which has collected numerous awards during the past 40 years. But Lubetz explains: “I’ve got a lot of gray hair.” In other words, prospective clients want to know that he or someone else in his firm is “going to be around awhile” before selecting him for any long-term developments.

Ha asks simply, “Why not us?”

And why not? After all, Front Studio has garnered acclaim throughout the architecture world. They’ve won several design awards and were named one of the “World’s 50 Hottest Young Architectural Practices” by Wallpaper magazine. Surely their youthful pedigree will combat Lubetz’s hair color.

“Wow!” Lubetz says, wondering why he hadn’t thought of that before. He had always been impressed by Ha when she was a student, and though he’d never taught Yanagishita, he’d followed both of their impressive careers. “I figured they’d know someone,” he says. “But they were there, and I was looking them in the eye, and the idea clicked.”

Yanagishita needed no convincing. “There’s an inherent amount of trust with Art,” says Ha.

The two firms recently merged—under the umbrella Front Studio Architects, LLC—with Ha, Lubetz, and Yanagishita as the principals. From their two offices in Pittsburgh and Manhattan, they’ve already embarked on new ventures, collaborating by phone and through lots of back-and-forth emails. Lubetz finds the distance advantageous to the creative process. This way, he says, they can share viewpoints and still retain their autonomy. It’s unlike the relationship he had with his previous well-beloved partner; the two of them shared a desk. “We would fight to draw the next line,” he laughingly recalls.

The Front team is currently working on a new jazz club in downtown Pittsburgh, a location that particularly delights Ha and Yanagishita because it means they don’t have to wait for the end of a Carnegie Mellon semester to return to their old collegiate stomping grounds.