The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture is delighted to announce the appointment of Irene Cheng as an Associate Professor with a focus in History, Theory and Criticism in Architecture starting in spring 2026.

"I am excited to welcome Irene to our faculty,” stated Acting Dean Hayley Eber. “Her expertise as a brilliant scholar and intellectual leader will bring a unique and vital perspective to our curriculum and studio culture."

An established and celebrated architectural historian, critic, and educator, Cheng has had a significant impact on the field by exploring the entanglements of architecture, culture, politics, and the environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Her most recent book is The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). She is a co-editor, with Charles L. Davis III and Mabel O. Wilson, of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and co-editor, with Bernard Tschumi of The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (The Monacelli Press, 2004). Cheng is also engaged in contemporary design as an architecture critic and as a founding principal of the multidisciplinary design practice Cheng+Snyder. She is a recipient of many awards and recognitions, including the ACSA Diversity Achievement Award and the AIA San Francisco Community Alliance Education Award.

Cheng will join The Cooper Union from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she is Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Architecture. Cheng has also taught at University of California, Los Angeles and at Columbia University; she received a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University, and a Master of Architecture and PhD in Architecture (History and Theory) from Columbia University.