© Amelyn Ng 2025
Amelyn Ng is an architect, researcher, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. She has previously taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Rice University.
Ng holds a Bachelor of Environments and Master of Architecture from the University of Melbourne, and a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices at Columbia GSAPP. She is a registered architect in the State of Victoria, Australia.
Amelyn is a co-founder of Friends Making Work, a design collective based in NYC. Her own creative practice contends with relationships between digital media and physical matter, and seeks alternate narratives to the status quo of building. She is particularly interested in inventories, waste, and critical material organization. She also draws cartoons.
Her scholarly research examines the aesthetics, economies, and habits of architectural visualization, with a focus on information-rich modeling paradigms and their entanglements between digital media, 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.