Toshiko Mori established her firm, Toshiko Mori Architect in New York City in 1981. Her projects embrace specificity of context with conceptual clarity in order to arrive at creative resolution that balances internality and externality of architectural experience. She has engaged architecture as part of an artistic dialogue beyond the boundary of a building footprint to extend its territory past the natural and manmade world.

Throughout her career, her beginning as an artist marked her working processes as an architect, considering every project as if it were a site-specific installation. A small Commes des Gar?ons boutique in 1981 started a series of conceptually based interiors for showrooms and stores in New York City. Her twenty-four years as a practicing architect has produced projects ranging from houses in Florida, Maine, Connecticut, New York City and Israel, to museum projects in Maine, Institutional projects in New York and Maine, to an Art foundation— a renovation of an old Mill in Georgia, boat house proposal for Hudson River waterfront, and exhibition design for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She recently won a competition to design the new Visitors' Center for Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo, New York. Her specific area of interest is innovation in materials and fabrication methods for architecture using both new and traditional materials and techniques for integration of architecture with light, landscape, and technology.

She has been Professor of Practice of Architecture with tenure at the Harvard Design School since 1995, and became the Chair of the Department of Architecture in 2002. The teaching has provided her with a critical and intellectual forum to explore and test her ideas and architecture in order to stay at the vanguard of the profession. She was awarded the inaugural John Hejduk award from her alma mater Cooper Union, which honors a graduate for excellence in research and the practice of teaching. Her most recent book, Immaterial/Ultramaterial , published in September 2002 by George Brazillier, was based on the research and exhibition at the Harvard Design School.