# Yunghi Choi A.B. (1975), MA from Harvard Graduate School of Design (1979) person Yunghi Choi (Ch’oe Yŏng-hŭi, 최영희) is an accomplished Korean-American landscape architect and a proud graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design during a time when very few Korean women were able to attend.[\[1\]](#fn1) Her work ranges from individual gardens to large-scale urban planning and land restoration projects. She was born on April 10, 1951, in Tokyo, Japan, where her mother, Namhi Kim Wagner (Kim Nam-hŭi 金南姬 1923–2023), grew up and was educated and her father, [Ch’oe Pyŏng-u](http://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Contents/Item/E0057319) (崔秉宇 1924–1958), had been working in a diplomatic liaison office after the liberation of Korea from Japan in 1945. One year later, in March 1952, she and her mother moved to Pusan, South Korea, making it the first time she encountered the country of her heritage. A few months later, the two moved to Seoul, where they spent the rest of their time in South Korea before moving to the United States in 1961. In Seoul, Choi lived in a series of large traditional houses in the Kahoe-dong neighborhood with her parents and two younger sisters, Sŏk-hŭi and Sang-hŭi. Choi appreciated her surroundings from a young age; although she only spent a few years living in the last house that they lived in before moving to the States, her memories of its appearance are precise and fond. She distinctly remembers it as having a *sarangbang* (사랑방), or a room that served as a sitting or gathering room for guests, and some of her earliest memories involve her mother’s friends coming over often. That house, aside from being a large part of her formative years, was significant because her mother was its owner, a rare feat for Korean women at the time. Her mother had become a bread earner after her father went missing near Kinmen Island (Quemoy) and presumed dead while reporting on the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in September 1958 for the *Korea Times*. Choi spent the majority of her time at home or at her school, which was located down the hill from her house, and characterized those years living in Seoul as living a “very insular life.” It was at school where she first learned that she would be moving to America for her mother’s job at Harvard, beginning with a position at the Harvard-Yenching Library and then for the Korean language program. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Choi experienced the shock of a new culture and freedom for the first time. Growing up on Everett Street near Harvard Law School, she spent her free time playing with her sisters in various parts of the Harvard campus, including the Peabody Museum, Harkness Commons, and Radcliffe Quad. Left to her own devices, she enjoyed riding buses, buying things at the store, and generally wandering around, enjoying a childhood of adventure and independence. She attended the Agassiz School on Oxford Street, which is now named the Maria Baldwin School, and was a Girl Scouts briefly. As a child growing up in America, one of her favorite activities was going to the bookstores on Massachusetts Avenue and buying books with her allowance. She discovered her love of reading early on and Jane Austen novels in particular. Choi describes reading Jane Austen as impactful for her twelve-year-old self as she related to a lot of the themes in Austen’s novels, such as the role of women in society, family reputation, sense of duty, and as the oldest, responsibility to take care of her family. In Cambridge, Choi made friends at school but spent a large amount of time with her mother’s friends and colleagues, with whom she would discuss books and topics that her peers couldn’t relate to. When she was in 8th grade in 1966, Choi and her family with her stepfather [Edward W. Wagner](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2001/12/harvard-gazette-edward-wagner-dies-at-77/) (1924–2001) moved from Cambridge to nearby Lexington, where she attended and graduated from high school. In Lexington, Choi had to adjust to a new environment once again, as Lexington was more suburban than Cambridge and did not afford her as many freedoms as living on Harvard’s campus did. She focused all her efforts on her academics, taking a particular interest in her English classes where she could analyze literature to her heart’s content and be stimulated intellectually. The social context in which Choi attended high school was particularly noteworthy, as the civil rights movement was sweeping through America in the 1960s. In Boston specifically, the [METCO](https://www.doe.mass.edu/metco/) integration program was in full effect, busing African American students from areas like Dorchester and South Boston to Lexington and other white dominant neighborhoods beginning in 1966. Choi herself was a tutor for the students of the METCO program from the outset and noted that her school was still almost “completely white.” As a young Korean girl growing up in Lexington, she was particularly self-conscious about her ethnicity, especially given that there were very few families of color in the community. In high school, besides her studies and avid reading habit, Choi enjoyed fashion and making clothes with her friends. They made dress pants and wore them to school in protest of the mandated skirt requirement for females. In these small ways, Choi did not let her ethnicity or gender confine her and exercised her creative self-expression from a young age. Having always been academically gifted, Choi graduated high school one year early in 1969 and enrolled at Reed College in Oregon. Choi thrived at Reed, receiving a classical humanities education and taking classes in European literature, thought, and philosophy. Her time at Reed was particularly significant, as her education formed the basis of her intellectual heritage and largely shaped her adult way of thinking. After two years at Reed, she spent nearly a year abroad in her childhood homeland of South Korea, before returning to the States to pursue Asian studies. After looking into various programs around the country, she landed back at Harvard in 1973. At Harvard, Choi took classes in economics, biology, and art history. However, it was her history of architecture classes that really piqued her interest and led her to consider urban design as a possible career path. After graduating from Harvard in 1975 and working at the Harvard Planning Office for several months, she found her passion in landscape architecture and decided to stay at Harvard to pursue a degree in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. In addition to her classes, she was heavily involved with the dance program at Radcliffe, spent time with other graduate students at Dudley Hall, and as a graduate student, taught a freshman seminar as a teaching assistant. When Choi attended Harvard in the 1970s, it was still predominantly white. Although there were some international students and the civil rights movement saw a push for more African American students, it was unusual to see a largely diverse group of students. In terms of gender representation, there were quite a few female students at the time, especially after the merger of Harvard College and Radcliffe Women’s College in 1965. However, certain departments like economics were still mostly male. Choi first encountered a high level of diversity when she moved to San Francisco for work in 1979 after receiving a master’s degree in landscape architecture at Harvard. San Francisco was one of the most diverse places in America at the time, due to the recent change in immigration laws in 1965 and the subsequent influx of Asian immigrants and workers from countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. The rich urban life and ethnic diversity also made it an ideal place for her to raise her family as well. She found a job there as a landscape architect and juggled a work and family balance. In fact, despite her career success, she states that she was “desperate” to become a housewife. After coming to better understand her own relationship with her mother who has also become [a renowned ceramic artist](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/3/29/Namhi-Kim-Wagner-Gallery-224/), she made the choice to be a devoted mother. She applied the same passion and care that she poured into her work into providing for and raising her children as well. During the early part of her career, Choi worked as a landscape architect on large-scale urban or land planning projects. She participated in city-planning projects, designed large outdoor spaces, and worked with large tracts of land in California, Wyoming, and Colorado. Her work philosophy was always focused on doing the least harm to the land and protecting the natural environment while enhancing it and making it as visually pleasing as possible. She applied this philosophy again when she transitioned to smaller-scale, private projects, such as those involving client estates and private properties, prioritizing the health of the natural land while beautifying its features for her clients. After working in San Francisco for a few years, in the 1980s, Choi and her family moved to Washington, D.C., where her children grew up and graduated high school and where she shifted focus from large scale projects to more intimate projects for private clients. Eventually, she opened her own landscape architecture firm and worked on a variety of residential projects including old estates and properties located along the shores of the greater Chesapeake Bay. While Choi did not encounter too many client requests that morally challenged her work philosophy of preserving the land, on the few occasions she did, she remained true to her principles and walked away when clients wanted her to design in ways that breached environmental regulations or would ruin the existing landscape. In addition to private estates, large-scale residential projects, and commercial projects through her firm, Choi also taught landscape design for several years at American University in Washington, D.C., as part of a continuing education program and in the Architecture Department of Catholic University as an adjunct professor. Although the pay was minimal and the workload was rigorous, she enjoyed developing her own courses by incorporating her own design philosophy and new ideas into her teaching. Her time teaching also allowed her to form connections with future clients and branch out her business in the Washington, D.C., area. In 2010, Choi retired, as the nature of her clientele changed and the focus for some of her clients began to shift towards prioritizing style and grandeur over preserving and working within the existing environment. She moved to Arizona for retirement, where she continues to reside to this day when not spending summers in Vermont. Although she has retired, she is still very much tied to the land and active in carrying out her work philosophy of doing the least harm to the land and protecting its natural beauty. She is currently involved in land restoration projects in the Mexico/Arizona border where she lives. She volunteers with a land restoration group that works to physically restore and rehabilitate land that has deteriorated due to decades of mining and overgrazing of cattle. She also helps to create small-scale, community-level restorations and contributes to field schools and ecotourism training for youths in the area to introduce them to land rehabilitation and restoration. The group’s work involves preserving the contiguous land of a major wildlife border crossings in the region while protecting the ecosystems and working with indigenous communities in the area. Additionally, she supports a native plants nursery which supplies native grasses and plants to government agencies and environmental organizations, like Monarch International for their restoration needs. From Korea to Massachusetts to San Francisco, to Washington, D.C., to Arizona, Yunghi Choi has utilized her plethora of life experiences to cultivate a passion for knowledge and learning and inform her work to preserving and beautifying the environment. Despite being one of very few Asians at Harvard, both during childhood and in college, she did not let her differences hold her back and pursued her various interests to the fullest extent, from learning English to studying classical philosophy and literature to working on landscape architecture and urban planning projects. Her passion for her work and strong principles regarding the land enabled her to become a successful landscape architect. Even to this day, she continues to serve her community and protect the environment, using her passion and extensive expertise to restore degraded land and teach the importance of an environmental ethic to her local community. Written by Kaylee Kim, 5/20/2022 --- ### **Endnotes** [\[1\]](#p1) This biography is written on the basis of oral interview of Yunghi Choi conducted by Sun Joo Kim on October 8, 2021, in Cambridge, MA. - ## Decade [1970-1980](/decade/1970-1980) - ## Korean Alumni [Harvard College](/korean-alumni-decade/harvardcollege) [Graduate School of Arts and Sciences](/korean-alumni-decade/gsas)