Debbie Chen
![head shot of Debbie Chen](/sites/g/files/upbtqy111/files/styles/square_250x250/public/2022-08/ChenHeadShot22.jpg?h=7390350e&itok=WAibbxV4)
Debbie Chen is interested in systems of organization that transform the pragmatic into the sublime. Her projects often leverage mundane and overlooked considerations of material ecologies and industrial processes to produce rhizomatic and euphoric understandings of our built environment, rendering the invisible yet wide-reaching forces of infrastructure palpable. A licensed architect in New York and Wisconsin, Chen currently serves as Graduate Program Director and Assistant Professor at RISD. Prior to RISD, she was the 2021–22 Architectural Activism Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she explored the representation of climate activism through gameplay.
Courses
Fall 2024 Courses
ARCH 101G-01
GRADUATE CORE STUDIO 1: SUBJECTS. TOOLS. PROCESS.
SECTION DESCRIPTION
The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.
Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00
Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.
Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture