Lecturer Hisaya Sugiyama

Having worked in the international arena of architecture and development, Hisaya Sugiyama knows a thing or two about the fun as well as the difficulty of working on a project on a foreign soil and/or for an international client. With project experiences in the US, Japan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia and Bangladesh, he has provided design and project management expertise for, and learned from different project circumstances in the past 30 years in practice.

His design specialty in master planning (emphasis on public spaces and walkability) and mixed-use development (relational clustering and choreographing visitor experience) led to an award winning, 500-unit landed residential development, ARATA Garden Residences in Phnom Penh, and a GBA 35,712 sqm Kaifeng Plaza complex in Qingdao comprising of office, hotel, residential, and retail facilities. He has also designed Wei Ke Plaza in Qingdao, a GBA 111,000 sqm underground shopping center attached to a new subway station, and a GBA 27,000 sqm, 13F+B3F office tower, which is under construction in Dhaka. A few residential projects in Jakarta as well as a GBA 6,000 sqm highway rest stop in Japan are currently in progress.

The project management (PM) experience ranges from JR Central Towers (Nagoya JR Station) and Roppongi Hills Mori Tower and Grand Hyatt Tokyo to regional retail centers, hospital renovation, university relocation and high-end residential project involving several designers.

He is a licensed architect of the State of New York, and worked for Kohn Pedersen Fox (New York / Tokyo), RTKL (Tokyo), as well as TrizecHahn (Tokyo), a Canadian commercial developer. He has a Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a semester abroad at University of Paris while at MIT, and did a cross registration at Harvard Business School before finishing at GSD, taking “Entrepreneurial Management”.