© Amelyn Ng 2024
Amelyn Ng is an architect, researcher, and sometimes-cartoonist based in New York City. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and a 2019-21 Wortham Fellow at Rice University. She holds a Bachelor of Environments and Master of Architecture from the University of Melbourne, and a MS. Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices from Columbia GSAPP. She is a registered architect in the State of Victoria, Australia, and is part of Friends Making Work, a collaborative effort with Gabriel Vergara and Christine Giorgio.
Ng's research and exhibition practice explores architecture as media and environmental matter as information,1 and seeks alternate narratives to the status quo of building.2 She is particularly interested in inventories, waste, and critical material organization. She also has ongoing work on building information models and the entanglements3 of drawing with labor and material systems.
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.