Jia Yi Gu
Assistant Professor of Architecture
I am a Los Angeles-based historian, curator, and designer. My research and teachings explore changing definitions of architectural knowledge from the building site to the desktop with a special attention to how architects know and show their histories. I develop exhibitions, publications, and experimental programming and projects investigating cultural techniques in architecture, materials, care work, and institutional practices. I鈥檓 Assistant Professor of Architecture at 无忧视频 and one half of the design research studio .
I teach a wide range of courses about architecture and design through their histories of making, collecting, instituting, and displaying, with a focus on media studies, processes, historiography, and art and science intersections spanning the early modern period to present day.
My research investigates the history of cultural techniques in material experimentation, from modeling practices to the making of new materials. I co-curated the Getty PST Art and Science project Material Acts, an interdisciplinary , , and exploring the intersections of architecture, craft, and science through material experimentation and ecologies. My current projects include The Institution is a Proposition, a publication on the mission, histories, and labor economies of small and unusual architecture institutions, and 80 Buildings in the 80s, an exhibition on postmodern Los Angeles with Gary Riichir艒 Fox and Aurora Tang.
Over the past decade, I have cultivated a research-based curatorial practice centering transdisciplinary and inquiry-based exhibitions, alongside the critique and transformation of institutional practice. Previously, I was director and curator at the at the Schindler House. From 2014-2020, I served as director of , a Los Angeles based project space for experimental architecture. I am currently a Board member of the .
Courses Taught
(Please refer to HSA Departmental Courses for this semester鈥檚 courses.)
- ARCH179A Material Acts
- ARCH179B Architecture and Display
- ARCH179C Campus Architecture
- HSA 10 Architecture and Its Media