Amelyn Ng is an architect, researcher, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP. She has previously taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Rice University.
Ng holds a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices at Columbia GSAPP, and a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Environments from the University of Melbourne. She is a registered architect in the State of Victoria, Australia.
Working across exhibitions, publications, and media experiments, her work troubles the default settings of architectural representation and explores the possibility of planetary media.
Amelyn is a co-founder of Friends Making Work, a design collective based in NYC. Her creative practice seeks alternate narratives to the status quo of building, engaging themes of waste, material economy, and planetary extraction. Her writing examines the politics of architectural media and computational systems through a socio-technical lens.
From time to time, she also draws cartoons.
1 Architectural media are imperfect records of worlds, unstable inventories, and double-acts of specification and speculation. Drawings, models, maps, diagrams, spreadsheets, and instructional formats, all slip between abstraction and material reality.
How do these worlds overlap? Who/what gets to be visible or legible, and who/what is excluded from the frame? What counter-practices and alternative knowledges exist?
How do these worlds overlap? Who/what gets to be visible or legible, and who/what is excluded from the frame? What counter-practices and alternative knowledges exist?
2 Architecture is the largest file format you know. A building is slow information. It caches and organizes material, aesthetic, and infrastructural forces over time. It stores environmental time and material properties, it draws together labor and building systems, it absorbs legal ordinances and everyday occupation. In aggregate, the city might be seen as a real-time database layered with building types and technologies, property lines, planning decisions, and (human and non-human) stories at every scale.
3 Media is subjective, partial, and situated. I am interested in how the most banal spaces, systems, and images of our built environment are already information-rich and operative in the world. Elevating graphics over statistics, I look to make those more invisible dimensions and politics of space visible through research, design, and narrative.
4 I am currently working on a book project on architectural media, examining how the tools we use to draw, image, model, and record the world can constrain, enframe, and train the way we see and act on the world.