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Jia Yi Gu

is a Los Angeles-based architect, curator, researcher and writer with a special interest in exhibition-making and histories of knowledge production in architecture. She is director and curator at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and co-director of Spinagu. She works at the intersections of art and architecture. (+)


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Jia Yi Gu is a Los Angeles-based architectural designer, curator, educator and writer with a special interest in exhibition-making and histories of knowledge production in architecture. She is director and curator at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and co-director of Spinagu. She works at the intersections of art and architecture.

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Nature Near



Co-curated with Kate Yeh Chiu, Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2024.


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

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:
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.

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.