Amelyn Ng is an architect, researcher, and Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP. She is a co-founder of Friends Making Work, a design collective and practice of material interests in New York City.1
Working across exhibitions, publications, cartoons, and media experiments,
she addresses how media shape architecture’s material realities, politics, and practices.
By attending to the gap between representation and reality, she troubles
architecture’s default settings and seeks alternate narratives to the status quo of building.2
She is currently working on several projects: on building information, planetary media, and broken world design.3
Ng holds a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices from Columbia GSAPP, and a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Environments from the University of Melbourne. She was previously an Assistant Professor at RISD Architecture and a Wortham Fellow at the Rice School of Architecture.
1 Friends Making Work has exhibited at the Center for Architecture (New York), Bangkok Design Week (Bangkok), VI PER Gallery (Prague), the Chilean Architecture Biennial (Santiago), and the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence). Past themes include waste, salvage, depaving, dust, material depots, geological time, and planetary extraction.
2She has also participated in Exhibit Columbus (2025 University Design Research Fellowship), Copenhagen Architecture Festival, the Turkish Pavilion (17th Venice Architecture Biennale) and Luxembourg Pavilion (18th Venice Architecture Biennale), the 8th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Building Information at TU Berlin Architekturmuseum, Institution Building at CIVA, Fulfilled at OSU, A Weekend Affair in Singapore, and Sonic Dust at M&A Architecture Radio. She has been a 2026 fellow at the Institute for Public Architecture and a 2019-2021 Wortham Fellow at Rice Unviersity.
2She has also participated in Exhibit Columbus (2025 University Design Research Fellowship), Copenhagen Architecture Festival, the Turkish Pavilion (17th Venice Architecture Biennale) and Luxembourg Pavilion (18th Venice Architecture Biennale), the 8th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Building Information at TU Berlin Architekturmuseum, Institution Building at CIVA, Fulfilled at OSU, A Weekend Affair in Singapore, and Sonic Dust at M&A Architecture Radio. She has been a 2026 fellow at the Institute for Public Architecture and a 2019-2021 Wortham Fellow at Rice Unviersity.
3 Her writing has appeared in e-flux Architecture, Thresholds, the Avery Review, Cultural Politics, Materia Arquitectura, Perspecta, PLAT, the Journal of Architectural Education, Perspectives in Architecture and Urbanism, Critical Planning Journal, Architectural Review Asia Pacific, and in the edited volume Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation (2024), among other publications. Her cartoons have been published in Architect’s Newspaper, Pidgin, MONU, kuš, Arena, and the New York Review of Architecture, and Limn.