Jacob S. Walker

Jacob S. Walker, Jake, is one of the three co-founders of Ballistic Architecture Machine (BAM), a transdisciplinary practice founded in 2007 that moved to Beijing in 2009 and opened a second office in Shanghai in 2018. Its work runs from master plans, landscape, architecture and infrastructure to installations, exhibitions and urban initiatives, held together by one idea: that in the fast-growing, high-density cities of Asia it is the urban landscape, not the building alone, that deserves the most design attention.

BAM’s Indigo Playground in Beijing helped set off a boom in playground design across China; its largest building, the Baoshan waste-to-energy plant on the Yangtze delta, takes visitors through the plant and through the origins of the plastic waste crisis. In 2023 the Kyoto Global Design Award named BAM one of the hundred leading design firms in the world. Beyond client work, Jake leads BAM’s urban initiatives, design proposals for problems that have no client yet, such as Reimagining Guomao, a rethinking of the central intersection of Beijing’s business district presented at Yixi in 2018.

He has lectured at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the University of Toronto, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the University of Hong Kong. His recent venture, Yokai Systems, follows the crossing of physical and digital landscapes, from the worlds of video games to the gamification of carbon markets. He studied at Cornell and at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and lives between Beijing and Boston.