Join our upcoming Committee of 100’s Conversations—“Recollections, Pioneers and Heroes,” featuring Calvin Tsao, who will reflect on his journey in architecture, his interdisciplinary approach to design, and his commitment to advancing the arts and culture through philanthropy and leadership.

Calvin Tsao, FAIA, is a leading voice in contemporary architecture, whose work draws from a deep engagement with a variety of art forms and from an interdisciplinary approach encompassing urban planning, architecture, interior design, and product design. He has also been a major contributor to the arts, architecture and scholarship through his family foundation and his personal activities.

Peter Young, Chair of the Conversations Initiative and Committee of 100 New York Regional Chair and Board Member, will be the moderator.

Calvin Tsao
Leading Architect, Philanthropist, and Educator

Calvin Tsao, FAIA is a leading voice in contemporary architecture, whose work draws from a deep engagement with a variety of art forms and from an interdisciplinary approach encompassing urban planning, architecture, interior design, and product design.

As founding partners of Tsao & McKown Architects in New York City, he and Zack McKown have won a wide array of professional awards including: AIANY Medal of Honor (2022), AD100 (2016), American Architecture Award/Chicago Athenaeum, William Beaver House (2010), Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award for Interior Design (2009), Preservation League of New York State Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation, River Lofts Condominium (2007), Interior Design Hall of Fame (2001).

Beyond his studio, he has taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), which presented its Alumni Council Award to him in 2024 and where he has been a longtime member of the Dean’s Council. He has also taught at The Cooper Union, Syracuse University, and The New School/Parsons School of Design. He has been a lecturer, panelist, or guest critic at many U.S. and overseas institutions. He is Chair of the Board of the American Academy in Rome, where he was a resident in 2010, and is President Emeritus of the Architectural League of New York, where he continues to serve as a director.

Through the Tsao Family Foundation, Tsao has recently effected major endowments for both the Harvard GSD and the American Academy in Rome. For the GSD, he established the Real Estate Practicum as the new capstone requirement of the GSD’s Master in Real Estate (MRE) curriculum. The practicum, which each student fulfills with a private, public, or non-profit real estate organization, updates the paradigm for the MRE degree in that it advances a more holistic and contemporary approach to projects by which real estate development professionals can help to shape a more sustainable, inclusive, and vibrant future for their communities. For the American Academy in Rome, he established three new scholarly programs.

The Tsao Family Rome Prize supports scholarship that illuminates the philosophical and existential ideas and questions that link eastern and western cultures, drawing on the experience of Rome as a crossroads. These ideas and questions animate the world around us and are evident in art, architecture, design, literature, and even the writing and interpretation of history itself. Collectively, the work emanating from this fellowship aims to encourage our world’s many societies and cultures to develop cooperatively and to strengthen the foundation of a more humane and mutually supportive global community.

The Tsao Family Residency supports distinguished Asian artists in a two month stay to create art or conduct research in the Academy’s library and archives. Tsao Family and Harvard University Graduate School of Design Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome servers as a bridge by bringing the finest architects and designers at the GSD to the Academy to promote a critical engagement between the two institutions in the areas of architecture, urban design, or landscape design.

Peter Young
CEO and President of Young & Partners
Committee of 100 Member and Board Member
Chair of the Committee of 100 Conversations Program

Peter Young is CEO of Young & Partners, a boutique investment banking firm focused on the life science and chemical industries. He manages the firm and is actively involved in client transactions and financings. Under his leadership, Young & Partners has established and maintained its position as a highly regarded firm serving the corporate strategy, M&A, restructuring and financing needs of clients worldwide. He was previously head of industry groups at Salomon Brothers, Schroders and Lehman Brothers, a senior private equity executive with J.H. Whitney & Co. and a senior member of Bain & Co., the corporate strategy firm.

Young received a BA in Economics from Yale, an MS in Accounting from NYU, and MBA from Harvard Business School where he graduated with Distinction as a Baker Scholar. He is a CPA and a Chartered Global Management Accountant. He serves on a number of boards of directors, both corporate and non-profit and is a board member of Société de Chimie Industrielle, a leading life science and chemical industry non-profit organization and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Pharmaceutical Executive.