The Radical (Re)thinker

The first gig Jennifer Kolstad (M.ARCH. ’06) landed after graduating was a tad more trying than your typical entry-level job.  

“There were bombs flying overhead,” Kolstad says of her time flying into the country of Jordan to work for its king. While Jordan attempted to broker peace between Lebanon and Israel, Kolstad—as a senior designer at Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill—was part of a team that consulted with CIA agents and Jordanian generals to build a fortified underground security center with near-impenetrable access points.

It was the first of Kolstad’s Middle East projects—and not her most impressive. That would likely be when she led design for the team that brought Formula One racing to the United Arab Emirates.

When the Yas Hotel opened in Abu Dhabi in 2010, it had been seismically designed to withstand the vibrations of the racetrack that passed through it, just in time for the country’s inaugural F1 race.  

“When I moved there, it was dirt, and then suddenly it was that,” Kolstad says of the massive tourism and raceway project, which also included six other hotels, a marina, and the F1 circuit.  

Kolstad, who has gone through phases of what she calls “radical experimentation,” has taken chances and opportunities that other designers could only dream of. Now, as the global design and brand director and the head of retail design at Ford Motor Company, she’s in charge of “rebuilding the experiential brand” of everything that’s not an automobile. That includes revamping 300 million square feet of buildings globally, as well as a network of more than 10,000 dealers.  

“None of it had been looked at holistically in decades, [maybe] ever. You couldn’t visit two offices in the world and understand they were both Ford,” Kolstad says of the challenge.

In effect, the designer who helped put a racetrack through a hotel and ran a glass slide from the 70th floor of a Los Angeles office building is now responsible for redesigning the experience of buying a car for one of the world’s oldest and most iconic car companies.

Colleagues say she’s up for it.

“Jennifer is a force. She doesn’t see the silos, doesn’t see the boundaries,” says Upali Nanda, global sector director of innovation, partner, and executive vice president for HKS Architects & Designers. “She is one of the most talented designers I know. She understands that if you’re designing for people, you need to understand people with the same level of rigor that you understand materials.”

Jennifer Kolstad, global design and brand director at Ford Motor Company, in the showroom of Ford’s new corporate headquarters in Detroit.

Back when she was ducking bombs for the king of Jordan, Kolstad had an epiphany about ambition. In the Middle East, while working for sovereign landowners such as ALDAR and TDIC, you learned to build fast and big, she says—and you toss out your job description. You adapt to what is needed. In the United States, on the other hand, jobs are more compartmentalized: project managers don’t get into design, and 
vice versa.

She brought that thinking back to North America when she worked for Gensler, one of the largest global design and architectural firms in the world, to build its hospitality practice. One of the projects she led was the renovation of the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, which included an observation deck and a free-hung glass slide that allowed visitors to slide from the 70th floor to the 69th floor on the outside of the building.

“Do you know how hard it was to find a structural engineer to sign off on that?” Kolstad laughs. “We were just doing crazy stuff; it’s like I brought Abu Dhabi back with me.”

She later became the global director of interior architecture for HKS, where she helped design the yet-to-be-built Kuwait Children’s Hospital, in Kuwait City, Kuwait, a structure four football fields long that would be the Middle East’s first tertiary hospital. The design includes whale-shaped rooms with turtle-shaped furniture to set children at ease.

“To innovate health care, you don’t design a hospital as a hospital. You bring knowledge from other areas: civic design, higher education, hospitality. You never innovate a category from within a category,” she says.

Ford Motor Company came calling in 2019. Together, Kolstad and Ford created a new role for her, allowing Kolstad to oversee the company’s more than 300 million square feet of building space. She became the first design leader to build a strategy for Ford’s experiential brand.

A primary initial task: to dissect the current dealership experience.

“If the priority is to repair trust and reconstruct human-to-human relationships, instead of focusing on selling cars, inevitably the design solution is radically different,” Kolstad says.

Kolstad drew upon her experience in hospitality and health care to redesign dealership spaces, using science and data to strengthen specific human interactions. The new dealerships are more like hotel lobbies, with soft seating and cafes to support relationships. 
She removed enclosed offices, allowing customers to decide where they want to be.

With the opening of the first U.S. pilot, “Within six weeks, sales associates were adapting to a new way of working. Customers were also using the spectrum of choices and experiences provided, and our dealer is already recording banner sales,” Kolstad says.

On top of all that, Kolstad was in charge of leading the design of Ford’s new global headquarters, which opened in November 2025. The iconic 2.1 million square-foot building includes a space-age concrete showroom that would take Darth Vader’s breath away, Kolstad jokes.

“We lead design with human science: neurology, behavioral psychology. To bring a neurologist into a room with architects is a big departure from a typical team model. But you figure out how to dance together for these very large projects, and the impact is notable,” says Kolstad.

It’s that type of mindset that makes Kolstad so effective.

“I think it was the fact that she got human science into the business of design,” says Nanda. “She invested in understanding ‘why,’ and then lets people understand the ‘so what.’”  —Tad Vezner