Renee Y. Chow, AIA, is professor of architecture and urban design at University of California Berkeley as well as founding principal of Studio URBIS. She is currently serving as the William W. Wurster acting dean at the College of Environmental Design.
Both her practice and her research focus on the intersection between architecture and its locale. Urban challenges of the 21st century — increasing density, reducing resource consumption, and intensifying urban legibility — require solutions that are locally rooted. To encode local conditions, Renee has developed analytic and generative tools for integrating urban and architectural systems across sites and individual buildings. To re-shape the discourse about the forms of urbanism both in suburbs and cities, Renee has written Suburban Space: The Fabric of Dwelling and Changing Chinese Cities: The Potentials of Field Urbanism.
Renee has been honored with the Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics from 2005 to 2010, “Ten Top Architectural Educators” in the United States by Architecture magazine, as well as numerous research and project awards from the American Institute of Architects. Her work has been exhibited at the Biennales in Hong Kong-Shenzhen and Chengdu. She received her B.S. AD and M.Arch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she also taught before joining the faculty at Berkeley.
