renee chow

Renee Chow

Chair, Department of Architecture
Professor, Architecture and Urban Design

Professor Chow’s practice and research both focus on the intersection between architecture and its locale. She has developed analytic and generative design tools for integrating urban and architectural systems across sites and individual buildings. These tools are directed toward encoding and extending local conditions, increasing urban legibility and identity, differentiating agency and time, embedding resource strategies at a community scale, and facilitating design collaboration. To re-shape the discourse about the forms of urbanism both in suburbs and cities, Professor Chow has written Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling (2002) and Changing Chinese Cities: The Potentials of Field Urbanism (2015).

She is also principal of Studio URBIS, an architecture and urban design practice. Projects include single- and multi-family residences, institutional and commercial projects, as well as urban and community specific development plans and studies.

Professor Chow has served as CED Acting Dean as well as CED Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs. She received her SBAD and M.Arch. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also taught.