My research and teaching look at urban infrastructures and collaborative processes in architectural design. My writing looks at the political, economic and social intensities that inform imaginations of space. Some of this writing, and much of my design work, has involved collaborations with other architects or scholars and practitioners from outside the discipline. Ongoing projects include: a study of open-ended partnerships between dancers and architects and the development of architectural scenario planning as a speculative method for urban futures. This research informs my teaching, as does my interest in working between disciplines.
My writing has appeared, most recently, in Architectural Theory Review, Public Culture and Global Performance Studies. Shorter works of public scholarship include recent contributions to Platform, MayRevue, Drawing Matter, the CCA web-journal and Places.
My book Curb-scale Hong Kong: infrastructures of the street (2023) uses drawings and writing to consider the intersections of policy, labour, economics, material and design that divide Hong Kong’s street into a contested ground. With John C.F. Lin, I am the co-author of As Found Houses: experiments from self-builders in rural China (2020). As Found Houses documents renovations of traditional village house typologies with interviews, photographs and drawings that reframe architecture’s relation to vernacular knowledge. The book was the winner of the 2021 Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Medal for Research and a finalist for the University of New Mexico On the Brinck Book Award.
Since the fall of 2023, I have been an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Swarthmore College. I ask my students to think broadly about architecture as a humanistic mode of practice. I hope that drawing and fabrication can, for the students, coalesce into methods for engaging with larger societal challenges that inform our relation to sites, communities, resources and moving through architecture. Before arriving to Swarthmore, I taught in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong; with Dieter Dietz in the ALICE Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne; at the New School’s Parsons Paris program; and at the Ecole national supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais with Anne Attali, Steven Melemis and Nasrin Seraji.
I am currently completing a doctoral dissertation with Angelika Schnell at the Academy of Fine Arts (Vienna). This work considers the architectural resonances of geographer Doreen Massey’s spatial imagination. After receiving a BA from Stanford University, I worked for several years in Washington and New York, before completing a professional degree in architecture at the Cooper Union for Science and Art, and later, an MA in Indian Studies at Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. In 2018, and in several always too-short periods since then, I have taken part in Butoh workshops with Moeno Wakamatsu in southern Normandy.
Please get in touch if any of this sounds like a place to start a conversation.