“Designers have to be optimists”: Dean Renee Chow charts a positive future for environmental design
Renee Y. Chow is stepping down as dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and retiring from the faculty. During her tenure as dean, she focused on positioning college faculty and graduates to solve the urgent environmental design issues of the 21st century.
William W. Wurster Dean Renee Y. Chow, who announced last February that she would step down after one five-year term as dean of the College of Environmental Design, will retire from the faculty this summer. A nationally recognized leader in architectural education — she was honored as an ACSA Distinguished Professor in 2021 and selected as one of the “Top Ten Architectural Educators” in the United States by Architecture Magazine — Chow will hold the title Professor Emerita of Architecture and Urban Design.
After more than 30 years on the faculty and serving in leadership roles at CED, extensive service to the campus and the profession, and decades practicing architecture and urban design as co-principal of Studio Urbis, this would seem like a point in her career to reflect on past achievements. Instead, Dean Chow wants to think about the future of environmental design.
“Designers are inherently forward-looking,” she declared at the outset of a lecture she gave this semester co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture and AIA East Bay.
Her deanship has been defined by this focus on the future, laying the groundwork for the future success of the college, its faculty, its students, and its graduates. She strategically aligned the college’s advancement efforts to support initiatives that will reshape environmental design education, research, and practice, raising $76.5M in philanthropic support.
“My approach has been to look for the connections that bring our community together — scholastically, historically, and culturally — and to navigate CED’s legacy toward a strategic future that sees environmental designers as leaders in shaping our cities and landscapes for the 21st century,” Chow says.
Rebuilding a thriving community for creative and intellectual interaction
Chow’s deanship began in 2021, a period defined by the return to Bauer Wurster Hall following the easing of the pandemic. Having steered the college through the transition to remote learning as acting dean in 2019, she understood that the CED community flourishes because of its collaborative studio culture, dynamic student organizations, and cross-disciplinary research partnerships .
One of her first priorities was to create opportunities for re-establishing these kinds of in-person connections. She hosted welcome parties for students and faculty on the first day of the fall semester, seeding friendships and collaborations, and launched a college-wide lecture series, among other initiatives.
By sponsoring three interdisciplinary lecture series, Living With — and Without — Water, Justice by Design, and Technology for a Sustainable Tomorrow, Chow brought together the entire community around some of the most significant challenges CED graduates will encounter.
Department of Architecture Chair Lisa Iwamoto connects Chow’s commitment to community-building to her approach to design: “Understanding that elements of our constructed environment too often act as disconnected pieces, Renee’s work asks how design can stitch the specificities of buildings, landscapes and cities together into a more cohesive, yet locally derived and celebrated, tapestry. So it is not surprising that Renee is a gifted community builder: under her leadership, our community has thrived.”
Spearheading forward-looking initiatives to support students and expand access
Chow’s tenure has been marked by a commitment to widening access to a CED education, with an eye to reshaping the future of the environmental design professions. Notably, she spearheaded two landmark initiatives to remove financial barriers for students: she worked with alum Jon Stryker (MArch 1989), founder and president of the Arcus Foundation, to build the Arcus Social Justice Corps Fellowship for master’s students and established the Technology Access Initiative for undergraduates.
With Stryker’s gift of $5.3 million in 2021, CED launched the Arcus Social Justice Corps as a pilot program. Stryker’s subsequent gift of $10.8 million in 2024 — the largest single donation to the college to date — ensures the successful continuation of the fellowship through 2031, which fully funds students who commit to pursuing careers at the intersection of environmental design and social justice.
“Arcus Fellows are making an impact on the culture at CED by bringing a social justice lens to all of their courses. Going forward, Arcus Fellows will not only transform the communities they touch but refocus the priorities of design professions as well,” says Chow.
In order to level the playing field for CED undergraduates, 39% of whom are first-generation and 36% receive Pell Grants, Chow has raised more than $1.6 million for CED’s Technology Access Initiative. It ensures equitable access to the technologies, tools, and materials students need to succeed by providing free access to computing infrastructure for all undergraduates and waiving fabrication and shop fees for those with the greatest needs. Supporting these students at this point in their academic careers will, over time, create change within the professions.
Advancing design research and scholarship
Chow has focused on advancing research and design discoveries by securing new funding opportunities and establishing the position of associate dean for research and design to forge philanthropic, governmental, and industry partnerships. And, significantly, she successfully advocated for professional practice to be recognized as scholarship within the university.
Thanks to her efforts, nearly $500,000 in seed grant funds will be awarded for summer research in 2026. “At a time when federal research funding is shrinking, our donors have stepped up to support CED faculty research and design,” Chow says. These initiatives include the Lau Fund for Just Climate Futures, CED Research Projects on Climate Change Fund, the Faculty Design Futures Fund, and a recent gift from Autodesk.
“This is how we cultivate the future visionaries and problem-solvers that the world urgently needs,” Chow said upon acknowledging the recent $1M gift from alum Karen Swett Conway (BA Architecture 1982) that established the Faculty Design Futures Fund.
Chow has also supported faculty in advancing their academic careers by successfully demonstrating to the university the value of design as research. The broader campus now understands that critical, reflective professional practice contributes to the public good and to disciplinary scholarship.
“We may be the first in the country to credit project phases common in design practice in promotion decisions,” says Chow. “I truly hope it will have a transformative effect on design education, first here at UC Berkeley and eventually across the country.”
A Call to Architects to Cultivate a Better World
In her AIA East Bay talk in March, Chow challenged architects to cultivate better futures by shifting from being sculptors to being gardeners. “Our buildings are not stand-alone objects but are part of larger systems where every design action contributes to a broader built environment.”
“This gardener mindset requires architects and planners to see the environment as an inheritance that must be extended, repaired, or complemented for future generations. It is a call to move past ‘self-expression’ and instead focus on the collective fabric of the city, leaving room for others to ‘weave in the weft’ of the built environment,” she said. By championing the cultivation of cities, she has taught generations that buildings are not solitary works of art, but living parts of a shared city.
Similarly, Dean Chow’s leadership for the college has been about cultivating a living system for the future. “I look forward to seeing the college thrive under new leadership, furthering CED’s legacy of visionary design and research that improves cities, landscapes, and lives.”