Irene Cheng

Associate Professor, Architecture Program

TOPIC: “ Forest, Plantation, Bungalow: The Material Constitutions of a Building”

Irene Cheng is an architectural historian, critic, and educator. Her research explores the entanglements of architecture, culture, ad politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current book project, entitled “The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America" (forthcoming, University of Minnesota Press) explores the geometry of architectural projects affiliated with anarchist, socialist, abolitionist, free love, spiritualist, and other radical antebellum movements. The project has received generous fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whiting Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Huntington Library, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Cheng is a co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (The Monacelli Press, 2004). Cheng is an associate professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts, where she is a founding director of the Experimental History Project. She is the recipient of a 2019 Diversity Achievement Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and an AIA SF Community Alliance Award.