The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series | Christine Chang: Dialogue as Method — Objects,Thresholds & Off-Modern Ruins

Thursday, October 29, 2026, 6:30 - 8:30pm

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Image courtesy of Simone Bossi.

Image courtesy of Simone Bossi.

This event will be conducted in-person in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here. 
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

The lecture examines three projects that engage the central themes of this year’s series: a furniture fair installation, an exhibition in dialogue with Carlo Scarpa, and an adaptive reuse project. The presentation traces core threads within Neri&Hu’s interdisciplinary practice - including fictional narratives, scenography, East Asian spatial frameworks, reflective nostalgia and the off-modern ruin. Offering insight to the studio’s design process, the talk foregrounds critical feedback loops—failures, material resistances, fieldwork, and in-situ confrontations—where knowledge is produced through dialogue with existing constraints. Here, dialogue operates as an overarching framework spanning three modes of engagement: between floor plan and object, between contemporary practice and archival history, and between modern interventions and existing building structures. Ultimately, this dialogical approach highlights the continuous negotiation between research and practice, inviting user agency and cross-medium modalities into the shaping of the built environment.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Kevin Yang.

Christine Chang is an Associate Director at Neri&Hu, having led master planning, architecture, interior and exhibition projects since 2012. Working closely with founding partners on research and teaching, she was a key contributor for the practice’s second monograph, Thresholds: Space, Time and Practice, and leads Venice Studio summer design workshops. She has participated in design studio juries at Yale University, Princeton University and HKU(Shanghai Study Center). Her background includes professional experience at Matter Practice and TEN Arquitectos, with research internships at Stan Allen Architect and Guy Nordenson and Associates. Chang received her M.Arch degree from Princeton University and her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley with a minor in city planning.  

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Located at 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues

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