Jia Yi Gu

is an architectural designer and historian with research interests in the history and politics of architectural knowledge production, through the lens of media histories, display practices, material cultures, and feminist ethics of care. She is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvey Mudd College and co-director of research and designs studio Spinagu. (+)

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Jia Yi Gu is a Los Angeles-based architectural researcher and designer with a special interest in critical and alternative practices in architecture. She is co-director of Spinagu and Assistant Professor in Architecture at Harvey Mudd College. Previously, she was director and curator at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and Materials & Applications. She develops exhibitions, texts, public programs and experimental projects.

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The Architecture of Scenes and Screens


The Architecture of Scenes and Screens proposes to understand images as material configurations. How are images constructed? How
have views historically and contemporarily been configured, assembled, and put together to produce what is perceived to be a seamless visual artifact? By constructed, we mean semiotically (in terms of meaning) but also tectonically (in terms of making), wherein the construction of visual scenes often require measuring, joinery, seaming, and assembly. It takes as its starting point the history of scenographic production as it intersects with forms of architectural display, including viewing technologies such as dioramas, perspective boxes, Ames room etc. The project attempts
to engineer a relationship between views and viewing — between scenes and screens — in order to turn attention to how such techniques of viewing (and its construction) can similarly affect modes of thinking and making. As such, the studio insists that the production of views is no a-historical but in fact derives from a long history of architectural thinking around tools, technology, and techniques.

Co-taught with Maxi Spina, Kenneth Sargent Visiting Critic at Syracuse University, Architecture. Fall 2019.



Spinagu, Models With Properties, 2018 (Team: Nancy Ai, Vincent Yung)