MIT buckles the whole architecture West-goes-East flavour du jour by selecting the very exciting Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang (Atelier FCJZ or Feichang Jianzhu) as new architecture department chair. The selection only depends on final Institute-wide approval.
Dean Adele Santos wrote to the department:
Many of you already will be familiar with his name. He is presently Head and Professor of the Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University in Beijing. He studied and taught in the US for 15 years before returning to Beijing where he also established China's first private architecture firm, Atelier FCJZ (Fei Chang Jian Zhu).
Yung Ho received his master's in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He became a licensed architect in the US in 1989. While in the US he taught at Ball State, Michigan, UC Berkeley, Rice and Harvard University's GSD where he was the Kenzo Tange Chair Professor of 2002. He has lectured extensively, most recently at Yale, Princeton, Cornell, SCI-Arc, Penn, Berkeley, Berlage Institute (Rotterdam), Chinese University (Hong Kong), Hong Kong University and Tunghai University (Taiwan).
Among his awards, which have recognized design competition entries as well as built work, he got the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts. He has numerous publications including several monographs, the latest one in English/French entitled "Yung Ho Chang/Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice." This year there are three more publications coming out about his work and his writings.
He has exhibited internationally as an artist as well as architect at the Centre Pompidou Paris, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and was included in the Venice Biennale three times. His current research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the city, materiality, and tradition. He often combines his research activities with design commissions.
We are very excited about Yung Ho Chang. He and his wife, also an architect, will move to Cambridge and will open a small office here. He's of the upcoming generation of practicing educators, he has a lot of energy and curiosity, he's generous, he's passionate about architecture, he's alert to some of our untapped potentials in the department and beyond, and he can open up wonderful new opportunities for us. >>
6 Comments
brialliant choice. lucky dogs.
really? I find it quite strange, but all the best for Yung Ho Chang! My suspicions are this is a more strategic alignment for MIT than anything else - kind of like the formation of the arbitrary connection between New York and Beijing with 32BNY...
too bad his web site look so 60's and is slow as molasses on a cold day.
Maybe a few MIT geeks can help him fine tune/ redesign that web site soon.
Was Atelier FCJZ really China's FIRST private architecture firm??? ... whoa, big brother has pretty tight control over such a big country.
China has a different system than US one, the register architect, who can stamp on the drawings, can only work at government owned "DESIGN INSTITUTE", and after their so-call "REFORM & OPEN", the foreigners are flooding into that massive market with a lot design commissions, and design only, since those guys in the "design institute" produce the construction drawings for you !!!!
And, they are a member of WTO now, so, I think they started to adopt the transformation step by step, to privatize the profession of ARCHITECT !!!
Isn't a chair's main duty to raise fund for the department? Maybe Chang could channel some money from Asia to Cambridge.
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