Renee Chow
 | Design as Inquiry: Speculations on Chinese Urbanism by Renee Chow |
Renée Chow is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and current holder of the Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture in 1993 and currently teaches design studios and seminars. Professor Chow is also principal of Studio Urbis, an architecture and urban design practice formed in collaboration with her partner, Thomas Chastain. Her work focuses on the intersection between architecture and its locale. One problem for contemporary design is to link the structure of the city and landscape with its individual pieces—to design how each affects and is affected by the other. In making pieces of our cities—highways and streets, parks and buildings—our current architectural culture too often strives for a degree of formal autonomy from surrounding circumstances. The experience of a city becomes a cacophony of competing markers. The experience of the textures of neighborhoods, the orientation of districts, and the collective practices of dwelling disappear as our design practices increasingly lose the tools to make them. To address this challenge, Chow’s practice and research focus on extending the concept of fabrics as fields, proposing new approaches for the design of the everyday environment (both urban and suburban) that emphasize the continuous, the shared, and the collective attributes of building design.
Labels: Fall 2009, UC Berkeley Faculty
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