These are but few of the many inspirations Eugenie Yanlin Huang Selway draws from to inform her work. Ms. Selway creates objects that seem like artifacts from a far away universe, collisions in materiality and construction. No matter what scale of work (architecture to jewelry), she honors the stories in client insights, and finds how her gained knowledge, intuition and technical know-how can impact these experiences into meaningful, usable spaces.

Growing up in the woods of North Carolina, surrounded by stacks of blueprints, art monographs, and music anthologies, Ms. Selway began making objects long before she understood them as design. Dog-eared volumes on Calder, O’Keeffe, and the Bauhaus lay open on tables, their margins and images quietly shaping her early experiments in form.

Her architectural training unfolded at MIT and Columbia, where she pursued both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. During that time, she was awarded the William E. Chamberlain Prize for Achievement in Architectural Design and the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize in Architectural Design — recognitions that affirmed a sensibility already in motion.

Between schools, she worked in Köln, Germany, contributing to social housing projects and absorbing firsthand a European ethos of civic design. Later, in middle Ohio, she spent a year dismantling and rebuilding motorcycle engines while working on medical facilities at NBBJ — a tactile counterpoint to firm life, requiring precision and patience.

Most recently, Selway served as Director of Global Store Design at Kiehl’s Since 1851. For nearly a decade prior, she led the New York–based architectural practice Formactiv, following earlier work at Polshek Partnership and Michael Sorkin Studio. She has served as a juror for studio reviews at Parsons School of Design, Columbia GSAPP, Barnard College, MIT Department of Architecture, and the Ohio State Knowlton School of Architecture.