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.
Recent Activities
Awarded funding for Third Landscape from Harvey Mudd College Innovation Accelerator, Phase I.
Appointed to the Board of Directors at the Feminist Center for Creative Work and to the advisory board of homeLA, 2024.
Curated Material Acts with Kate Yeh Chiu at Craft Contemporary, September 28, 2024—January 5, 2025. Materal Acts was awarded grants from National Endowment for the Arts, Getty Foundation, and Graham Foundation for the exhibition and publication of Material Acts, 2023.
Published the eponymous publication Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design, exhibition catalog, edited with Kate Yeh Chiu, Nov. 2024. An accompanying e-flux architecture collaboration in the form of an essay series was launched in Fall 2024.
Appointed Assistant Professor in Architecture, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts, at Harvey Mudd College, July 1, 2024.
Invited to jury the 2025 Architecture League Prize with Behnaz Assadi, Rayshad Dorsey, Liz Gálvez, Miles Gertler, Mario Gooden and William O’Brien Jr.
Presented “Surfacing Work,” Under the Influence 004: Spinagu and Langarette Navaro, LA Forum for Architecture and Urbanism, February 25, 2024.
Curated the exhibition VALIE EXPORT: Embodied, at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, February 2024.
Curated the exhibition Entourage, an exhibition presenting the work of contemporary architects who confront and expand the ways bodies serve as units of measure for architecture, at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, June 1 — September 15, 2024.
Launched MAK Center’s inaugural program series Subject Studies: Reorientations with Rosario Talevi . The program was awarded the PICE A/CE Grant and California Council for Arts Grant, 2022.
Invited by the French Institute to Paris Design Focus, a curatorial forum for global design curators, 2021.
Presented on institutional practices in the lecture “Major Repairs / Minor Spaces,” Care and Repair Conference, CalArts School of Critical Studies, January 15, 2021.
Organized “Tour as Format” and “Exhibition-Making in Modern Houses,” Curatorial Workshop, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 2021.
Presented dissertation research “Analogue Models and Cardboard Cutters in Eero Saarinen & Associates, 1956-1959,” gTA Doctoral Colloquium, ETH Zürich, September 28, 2021.
Presented her research at SAH Montreal in March 2021 “Cardboard Knowledge: Problem Solving and Perception in Saarinen's TWA Simulations” in the panel Utopias of the Self. Session chairs: Victoria Bugge Øye, Princeton University, and Larry Busbea, University of Arizona, April 14, 2021.
Co-organized SAH/GAHTC Teacher-to-Teacher Worksho “Backstage of the Global Histories Survey: Slow Looking, Translating, Listening, Activating” with Esra Akcan, Associate Professor, Cornell University, and Rafico Ruiz, Director of Research, Canadian Center for Architecture, March 20, 2021.
Lectured on the minor institutional practices through its data-rich details, including spreadsheets, exhibition budgets and systems of accounting in CARE-WORK: Space, Bodies, and the Politics of Care organized by Brittany Utting, Assistant Professor, Rice Architecture, March 2, 2021.
Co-organized Method Acts with Jonah Rowan and Jessica Varner, a series of virtual workshops by Society of Architectural Historians focused on scholarly techniques for graduate students and emerging scholars in architectural history and adjacent fields, January - February 2021.
Lectured at University of Toronto, “Surfacing Work” on recent projects by Spinagu, Nov. 25, 2020.
Co-organized “Can We Teach an Anti-racist Architectural History?” GAHTC Workshop and Roundtable. Co-organized with Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Ana María León, and Mabel O. Wilson.
Conversation with Ana Miljacki in “Conversations on Care,” MIT Critical Broadcasting Lab + WAWD? Radio, May 5, 2020.
Presented “Analogue Models and Cardboard Cutters in Eero Saarinen & Associates, 1956-1959,” Doctoral Talks, ETH Zürich, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (July 23, 2020).
Invited participant in the research workshop and working group “Understanding the Architectural Model,” organized by Maristella Casciato, Gary Fox, Emily Pugh at the Getty Research Institute, March 10-11, 2020.
Received the Gunnar Birkert Research Fellowship from UoM Bentley Library.
Also received the Checkpoint Charlie Fund for the project “Architecture as Cultural Exchange” with Gilly Karjevsky, Rosario Talevi, and Mimi Zeiger.
Contributed a short essay on haptic instruments in Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad to the exhibition catalogue of The Architecture Machine, curated by Teresa Fankhänel, Munich Architecture Museum.
Contributed a long essay “Formats of Care” in Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice, edited by Bryony Roberts, Winter 2020.
Curated and developed the curatorial topic Staging Construction at Materials & Applications, 2019.
Invited participant to Curator’s Forum, organized by EXPO Chicago and ICI with Chicago Architecture Biennale, 2019
Appointed D. Kenneth Sargent Visiting Critic (with Maxi Spina), School of Architecture, Syracuse University, Fall 2019
Gave the lecture “Rooms That Miss The Point,” Fall Lecture Series, Syracuse University, Oct. 1, 2019.
Appointed Visiting Artist/Faculty, School of Architecture, California College of Arts, Fall 2019.
Lectured “The Institution Is a Proposition,” Architecture Lecture Series, California College of the Arts, Oct. 7, 2019.
Research Residency at the Canadian Center for Architecture, Doctoral Students Program.
Invited Panelist to Formats of Care: Reclaiming Feminist Social Practice Working Symposia, Universität der Künste, Berlin, June 14, 2019.
Invited Speaker to Bogosian Fellowship Exhibition Talk with Michael Speaks and James Leng, Syracuse University, School of Architecture, May 3, 2019.
Thesis Critic, Super Jury, Undergraduate Thesis Projects, Syracuse University, School of Architecture.
Graduate Student Advisory Committee, Society of Architectural Historians, 2017-Present
Lecturer/Presenter, “The Work of a Small Architecture Institution” Midday Talks, University of Toronto, Daniels School of Architecture, February 13, 2019
Lecturer/Presenter, “Instituting Architecture,” Exploring Design Practice, University of Toronto, Daniels School of Architecture, February 13, 2019
Undergraduate seminar course “Architecture On Display,” History/Theory Seminar, Cal Poly SLO LA Metro Program, Winter 2019
Co-curated Privacies Infrastructure, Materials & Applications, Los Angeles, July 21-September 2018 with Aurora Tang)
“Bergfried: Activating the Ground Floor,” Guest Speaker with Atelier Fanelsa, MakeCity Festival of Architecture & Urban Alternatives, Berlin, June 24, 2018 (Thanks to Rosario Talevi)
“Making a Living in the New Culture Industries,” Moderator and Presenter, Berlinische Gallerie with MakeCity, Berlin, June 22 2018
“The Real and the Rendered,” Lecture, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Lecture Series, Helms Bakery, May 2018 (with Spinagu)
Guest Critic, Undergrad/Graduate Thesis Reviews, California College of the Arts, April 2018
“The Institution is a Proposition” Curatorial Talk, Media Design Practices, Art Center, March 22 2018 (Thanks to Mimi Zeiger)
“Architecture On Display,” History/Theory Seminar, Cal Poly SLO LA Metro Program, Spring 2018
“History of Architectural Ideas I,” History/Theory Seminar, SCI-Arc, Spring 2017, 2018
Project Grant Award for Privacies Infrastructure, Pasadena Arts Alliance, January 2018
“Collective Correctives #1: On/Off,” Co-organizer, M&A / 2426 SET, October 2017
“New Forensics: Scenarios and Simulated Environments,” Co-organizer with Laida Aguirre, M&A / 2426 SET, August 19, 2017
Exhibition/Production Grant Award, Graham Foundation for Advanced Study, 2017
Common Field Convening, Los Angeles, November 2–5, 2017 (Organizing Partner)
“Design Cultures,” Liberal Arts Seminar, SCI-Arc, Fall 2017
“Institutions, Installations, Instruments,” Lecture, TU Berlin Architecture, June 16 2017
Associate Director, UCLA Architecture & Urban Design Summer Institute, 2014-2017
Graduate Student Lighting Talks, Co-Chair, SAH Annual Conference, Glasgow, June 2017
Guest Critic, Graduate Thesis Reviews, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, June 2017
“Room With A View,” Installation, One Night Stand: Last Call, Curated by Jennifer Bonner, Kyle Miller, and Volkan Alkanoglu, Vikings Motel, Los Angeles, May 20 2017 (with Spinagu)
“Can A Building Own Itself? A Blockchian Workshop” Co-organizer, M&A / Navel, May 11, 2017
“In and Out of Pictures”, Panelist, Symposium, UCLA A.UD, Los Angeles, April 2017
“Zoning & Its Applications”, M&A / Los Angeles Poverty Department and Rosten Woo, March 2017 (Co-organizer)
“Collaboratory: A Column is a System,” Exhibition Review, ArtPapers, January 2017
Critical Studies MA/PhD Colloquium, Co-Organizer with Maura Lucking, UCLA A.UD, Los Angeles, 2015-2016
Curatorial Assistant, “The New Creativity: Man and Machine” Sylvia Lavin, 2015