Renee Chow
Both Renee Chow's practice and research focus on the intersection between architecture and its locale. One problem for contemporary design is to link the structures of the city and landscape with their 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 local experiences of neighborhood textures, district orientations, and collective practices of dwelling disappear as our design practices increasingly lose the tools to make them.
Urban challenges of the 21st century — flooding and drought, resource depletion, and urban uniformity — also require solutions that are locally rooted. Chow has developed analytic and generative design tools for mapping and transforming locales by integrating landscape, urban and architectural systems across sites and individual buildings. While adapting our communities for climate resilience, we can also build the unique legibility of every neighborhood. More can be found about reshaping forms of urbanism both in suburbs and cities in her books, Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling (2002) and Changing Chinese Cities: The Potentials of Field Urbanism (2015).
Currently, Chow is the William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design; she previously served as chair of the Department of Architecture. In 2021, she was named an ACSA Distinguished Professor. She has been honored by the College of Environmental Design with the Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics from 2005 to 2010, by Architecture Magazine as one of its “Ten Top Architectural Educators,” and by the AIA California Council with its Research and Technology Honor Award.
2021 ACSA Distinguished Professor, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Jan 2021
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange- Asia Pacific Region Publication Subsidies, May 2015
"10 of the Best Educators,” The Education Issue: 2009 Architecture School Guide. Architect Magazine, Dec 2009
Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics, UC Berkeley, 2005–2010
Finalist, Prytanean Faculty Award for Teaching, Prytanean Alumnae, UC Berkeley, 1998
Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship, UC Berkeley, 1997
Books
Changing Chinese Cities: The Potentials of Field Urbanism. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2015.
Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Selected essays and articles
"Which Comes First?” In Interdisciplinary Design Thinking in Architecture Education, edited by Julie Kim. New York: Routledge, 2024. 43–49.
"Continuity and Change: Challenging the Disposable Chinese City." In Architectural Design 87:5 (July 2017): 114–121.
"The Potentials of Field Urbanism." In Urban Design 2:2 (2015): 34-47.
"In a Field of Party Walls: Drawing Shanghai’s Lilong." In The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73:1 (2014): 16-27.
"Lessons from China: Re-Weaving Urban Fabrics." In Landscape Architecture Frontiers 1:5 (2013): 46-56.
"Breaking the Box." In Redefining Suburban Studies: Searching for New Paradigms, edited by Daniel Rubey, 33-43. Hofstra, NY: Hofstra University Press, 2009.
"Ossified Dwelling: or Why Contemporary Suburban Housing Can't Change." In Places 17:2 (Summer 2005): 54-57.
"Configuring the Residential Fabric." In Places 14:3 (Spring 2002): 42-43.
