Ray Kinoshita Mann

Ray K Mann, principal of RK Studio Architecture, has been designing homes in the Pioneer Valley since 1990. Her homes are noted for their dynamic living spaces which are well-suited to the intensive ways in which New England families use their homes for work and play. She seeks out the potential of the home to enhance family life and lifelong livability, creating innovative designs that both facilitate and celebrate a more environmentally sustainable and energy-efficient lifestyle. Using materials and technologies both old and new—from locally-harvested red pine to translucent aerogel panels—RK Studio homes are designed for living well today as well as into the future.

A professor of architecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Mann's projects include the award-winning Women’s Rights National Historical Park, in Seneca Falls, N.Y.; composer Tod Machover's "Brain Opera", which premiered at Lincoln Center; the interior redesign of the MIT Media Lab; several restaurants in Boston; and home designs from Arizona to New Hampshire.

As principal of RK Studio Architecture she received a Progressive Architecture Young Architects Award for the innovative nature of her practice, and she continues to work with a variety of new materials and unusual design applications. In recent years she has focused on rethinking the home, using contemporary materials and methods to address contemporary needs; her ideas about housing will be published in a book in 2014.

Mann is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she won a prestigious Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Traveling Fellowship and worked for Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rafael Moneo. Her undergraduate education, also at Harvard, was in visual and environmental design and engineering.

She lives in Amherst, Mass., with her husband, the writer Charles C. Mann, and their two children.