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Suenn Ho has her feet planted in both China and the United States.  Her reach extends from teaching and mentoring to academia, consulting, designing, leadership and community involvement. Among her goals is an ardent desire to see Portland’s Chinatown restored to the vibrant Asian community it once was while incorporating modern elements of design, urban function and green building.

Born in the Northeast and raised for a time in Hong Kong, Ho speaks Cantonese and Mandarin. Her fluency in both languages helped her earn a 1991 Fulbright Scholarship to study the walled city of Kowloon, China and a National Endowment for the Arts grant to study Chinatowns in America’s largest cities.

She is an advocate for the residents and businesses in Portland’s Chinatown and a founding member of Northgate, which developed the 15-story Pacific Tower project in Old Town/Chinatown. She has an ongoing project in Astoria working on a natural garden commemorating landscape architect Robert Murase in Heritage Square called the Garden of Surging Waves, which opened this past May.

Ho earned a bachelor’s degree from Williams College and a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University in 1991. She has taught at the University of Oregon’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts in both Eugene and Portland since 1993.  In 2011, she received an Honored Citizen Award from the Portland lodge of the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance.

She has served on numerous boards of nonprofit organizations over the years, and has been involved with Transition Projects Inc. and the Portland Classical Chinese Garden.