Community design; spatial justice; cultural preservation; building traditions; earthen architecture; architectural practice.
The lack of reciprocity in architectural practice and pedagogy poses a persistent threat to its relevance to social justice. Although the field has shifted away from paternalistic attitudes to embrace inclusive terms such as “engagement” and “inclusion,” and more recently, “empowerment” and “agency,” it continues to perpetuate extractive relationships with the communities it claims to serve. As Theodore Jojola observed in an interview I conducted for my historic preservation master’s thesis, “What is missing from academia is a framework for reciprocity. Many of these communities never see information come back to them. The information goes out, but not in.” Indeed, despite recurring interest in architecture as social practice, our discipline is haunted by entrenched patterns in which architectural experts accrue professional recognition and academic capital through commodifying cultural knowledge, while marginalized communities endure ongoing cultural and material dispossession. This recognition demands more than theoretical critique—it presents an urgent opportunity to reimagine justice-oriented practices beyond the comforts of “engagement" toward a radical reconstruction of how architecture and expertise is produced, shared, and valorized.
Tonia Sing Chi is an architect, builder, and educator from Oakland on Ohlone land. In her creative practice Peripheral Office, she weaves together storytelling, place-based building practices, and collective cross-cultural approaches to architecture and preservation. Her research into the ethics of participatory design often leads her to interrogate and reveal the historically extractive nature of community-engaged processes and community-institutional partnerships, and develop new frameworks for reciprocity and relationality in design coauthorship. Chi is a co-founder of Nááts’íilid Initiative, a nonprofit strengthening the cultural and economic resilience of Dinétah through sweat equity housing, hands-on regenerative building workshops, and cultural preservation. She is also a core organizer with Dark Matter U, a democratic network of designers committed to anti-racist design education and outcomes. In 2023, she launched Storytelling Spaces of Solidarity in the Asian Diaspora (SSSAD), an ongoing initiative that engages Asian diasporic designers in movement-building solidarity practices through storytelling, memory work, and knowledge sharing.
Chancellor’s Fellowship for Graduate Study, UC Berkeley, 2024
Journal of Architectural Education Fellowship, 2024
Graham Foundation Research and Development Grant, 2022
Charles McKim Prize for Excellence in Design, Columbia GSAPP, 2018
AIA Henry Adams Medal, American Institute of Architects, 2018
William Kinne Fellows Traveling Prize, Columbia GSAPP, 2018
Agrawal, Shalini, Tonia Sing Chi, Lisa C. Henry, Shawhin Roudbari, and Bz Zhang. Challenging Patterns of Supremacy: Provocations from Collective Pedagogy, Practice, and Organizing. MAS Context, 2025.
Charley, Elisha V., Tonia Sing Chi, and Shundana Yusaf. "Classroom in the 'Working Landscapes' of Contaminated Soil." Journal of Architectural Education 79, no. 1 (2025): 57–69.
Chi, Tonia Sing. “Beyond Participation in Tribal Housing and Perpetuation of Earthen Architectural Traditions.” In Terra 2022: Proceedings of the 13th World Congress on Earthen Architectural Heritage, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Getty Publications, 2025.
Chi, Tonia Sing, and Shundana Yusaf, eds. "Decolonizing Architectural Technologies." Dialectic IX (2021).