Irene Cheng
Associate Professor
Irene Cheng is an associate professor in Architecture at the Cooper Union. An architectural historian and critic, her research explores the entanglements of architecture, culture, environment, and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cheng is author of The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, and co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (with Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson) and The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (with Bernard Tschumi). Her book The Shape of Utopia received the On the Brinck Award in 2024. She is currently working on a book that explores the political ecology of Arts and Crafts architecture, as well as a related collaborative project called the Materialities of Empire.
Cheng received a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University, and M.Arch and Ph.D degrees from Columbia University. She previously taught at Columbia University, UCLA, and the California College of the Arts, where she served as chair of the Graduate Architecture program and as a founding co-director of History Theory Experiments, a platform for advanced interdisciplinary research and critical engagement in architecture.
Cheng is the recipient of a Diversity Achievement Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and an AIA SF Community Alliance Award. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Graham Foundation, Whiting Foundation, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, MacDowell Colony, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Previously Cheng worked as an architectural designer for Bernard Tschumi Architects before launching her own firm, Cheng + Snyder, with Brett Snyder. Cheng + Snyder’s project Museum of the Phantom City was exhibited at the Venice and Chicago biennials. The firm’s work has been published in Metropolis, Architectural Record, The Architect’s Newspaper, The New York Times, and in numerous books and blogs.
Cheng's CV is available here.
Projects
The Shape of Utopia
In the middle of the nineteenth century, a utopian impulse flourished in the United States through the circulation of architectural and urban plans predicated on geometrically distinct designs. Though the majority of such plans remained unrealized, The Shape of Utopia emphasizes the enduring importance of these radical propositions and their ability to visualize alternatives to what was then a newly emerging capitalist nation.
Drawing diagrammatic plans for structures such as octagonal houses, a hexagonal anarchist city, and circular centers of equitable commerce, these various architectural utopians applied geometric forms to envision a more just and harmonious society. Highlighting the inherent political capacity of architecture, Irene Cheng showcases how these visionary planners used their blueprints as persuasive visual rhetoric that could mobilize others to share in their aspirations for a better world.
Offering an extensive and uniquely focused view of mid-nineteenth-century America’s rapidly changing cultural landscape, this book examines these utopian plans within the context of significant economic and technological transformation, encompassing movements such as phrenology, anarchism, and spiritualism. Engaging equally with architectural history, visual culture studies, and U.S. history, The Shape of Utopia documents a pivotal moment in American history when ordinary people ardently believed in the potential to reshape society.
Winner of the On the Brinck Prize, 2024
Race and Modern Architecture
Co-edited with Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson
Although race—a concept of human difference that establishes hierarchies of power and domination—has played a critical role in the development of modern architectural discourse and practice since the Enlightenment, its influence on the discipline remains largely underexplored. This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. Challenging us to write race back into architectural history, contributors confront how racial thinking has intimately shaped some of the key concepts of modern architecture and culture over time, including freedom, revolution, character, national and indigenous style, progress, hybridity, climate, representation, and radicalism. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality—from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants—Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress.
The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century
Co-edited with Bernard Tschumi
In March 2003, Bernard Tschumi convened forty of the world’s leading architectural designers and theorists – Elizabeth Diller, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Greg Lynn, Winy Maas, Thom Mayne, Ben van Berkel, Mark Wigley, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and many others – for a conference at Columbia University. The exceptional array was asked to predict the conversations and directions of architectural practice in the 21st century. Speakers addressed the categories of current architectural discourse – form, aesthetics, material, detail, politics – and questioned their future validity. Other topics included architects’ obsession with the detail, the possibility of practicing a politics of material, the definition of an avant-garde urbanism, the importance of form beyond its aesthetic value, and whether architecture can directly influence the social world. The State of Architecture brings together manifestos, musings, and meditations to capture the key polemics raised by this extraordinary convocation of thinkers.
