Jia Yi Gu

is an architectural scholar, curator, and designer working on histories of knowledge production through the lens of media studies, cultural techniques, and material cultures (i.e. how we know and show our histories). Her research and courses explore changing definitions of architectural knowledge from the building site to the desktop. She is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvey Mudd College and one half of the architecture and research studio Spinagu. She develops exhibitions, texts,  and experimental programs and projects.
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Jia Yi Gu
 is an architectural scholar, curator, and designer working on histories of knowledge production through the lens of media studies, cultural techniques, and material cultures (i.e. how we know and show our histories). Her research and courses explore changing definitions of architectural knowledge from the building site to the desktop. She is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvey Mudd College and one half of the architecture and research studio Spinagu. She develops exhibitions, texts,  and experimental programming and  projects.
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Bio
Recent Activities 
Email

Website Under Construction





Material Acts


Material Acts examines the role of nature as a starting point for material experimentation in the domains of architecture, craft, and science. While nature has often stood in as a model, metaphor, or resource for designers, the recent global upheavals in climate, ecology, and technology are driving intensified understandings of nature’s tangible and imagined substrate. The research and curatorial project examines how contemporary design practice mobilize, confound, and generate natures, whether through simulating mechanics or growing biological matter.

Co-curated with Kate Yeh Chiu, Craft Contemporary as part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time Art and Science Collide, Los Angeles, 2024.


Meredth Miller and Thom Moran, Detail of Post-Rock, 2014-present. Image courtesy of Meredith Miller and Thom Moran. 


Schindler House:
100 Years in the Making


The four-month exhibition and programming series celebrates the pivotal first century of the landmark modern house in Los Angeles by Austrian-American architect R.M. Schindler. Alongside archival materials are contemporary contributions by artists and practitioners including: Carmen Argote, Fiona Connor, Julian Hoeber, stephanie mei huang, Andrea Lenardin Madden, Renée Petropoulos, Gala Porras-Kim, Stephen Prina, Jakob Sellaoui and Peter Shire.
 
Browse the exhibition guide

Co-curated with Gary Riichiro Fox and Sarah Hearne, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, May 28—September 25, 2022.


Exhibition views of Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making, MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

Subject Studies: Reorientations


A new public program series with the MAK Center. Subject Studies’ inaugural 2022 theme, Reorientations, directs perspectives and questions towards MAK Center’s own institutional habits, routines and practices. With the backdrop of the roof restoration of Schindler House, Reorientations seeks opportunities to reorient our own institution through perspectives of care, repair and transformation.

Co-curated with Rosario Talevi, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, 2022. 




Schindler House Centennial Program Series


The public program series features newly commissioned performances by jas lin 林思穎, the restaging of the opera Pauline, alongside a summer-long calendar of discussions, lectures series, curator-led tours, and asynchronous projects including the Schindler House Companion Tours.


MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, Summer 2022. 
 
  Graphic design by Christina Huang.

Architecture and Media


This course explores the relationship between architecture and media through an investigation into architecture’s tools and instruments. While the term media typically conjures images of screens, electronic circuits, and machinic devices, this course understands media in relation to a specific set of practices that architects engage in: writing, drawing, transporting, typing, accounting, scanning, quantifying, computing and interfacing. Media systems construct specific forms of knowledge, embody historical and political ideologies, and shape human agency, relationships, labor, value systems, and thought. By examining how architecture's relationship to media extends beyond “new” objects, tools, and technologies, we  construct an understanding of how media determines procedures, processes and practices inside and outside architecture.


University of Toronto, Daniels School of Architecture, Fall 2020.


Drawing a circle seems like a self evident practice in architecture. We don’t think about drawing circles as something that is mediated. But there are many instances in architectural history where architects have tried to grapple with the gap or ‘distance’ between ideation and realization by constructing a specific set of techniques to close that gap, with consequences following such closure.