Publications

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Abigail Chang

Critic

Abigail Chang is an artist, architect and critic at Yale School of Architecture, whose multidisciplinary practice is based in New York City. Her work is interested in subtle encounters that are driven by material qualities and details, and responds to currents in contemporary culture.

Chang examines how transparency, reflection, blurriness and flatness emerge through framing devices in the built environment, and have the potential to produce order and disruption. She received the Chicago Architectural Club’s Emerging Visions award in 2023. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in 2019 and the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in 2021. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and UIC College of Architecture, Design and the Arts, where she taught for six years.

Her solo exhibition, “Reflections of a Room” at Volume Gallery, re-imagined a collection of familiar, mirrored objects as windows viewed at night. Her site-specific installation, “Display Window,” transformed the Design Museum of Chicago’s building façade and multistory atrium into a shop window. “Skeuomorphic Screens,” a full-scale dwelling prototype, explored how screens singularly translate apertures, portals and reflections. Her writing, including the pieces “Screen Time,” “Double Vision” and “Reflection: Literal and Phenomenal,” critically observes overlaps between art, architecture, technology and photography.

Prior to starting her eponymous practice, Chang lived and worked in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Tokyo and Basel. At firms including Norman Kelley, SO–IL and Herzog & de Meuron, she developed projects of varying scales, such as the National Library of Israel, Chelsea Football Stadium, Petchi Dream Laboratory and Versace Showroom. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies from UCLA with distinction, and a Masters in Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she was awarded the Takenaka Fellowship. She is a registered architect in the state of Illinois and is represented by Volume Gallery.

Education

BA, University of California,
Los Angeles

MArch, Harvard University

Personal Website
Abigail Chang
Gallery Exhibition
Reflections of a Room

Courses

1021
Fall 2024
Architectural Design 3
Stella Betts, Abigail Chang, Martin Cox, Karolina Czeczek, Aniket Shahane, Peter de Bretteville
1116
Spring 2024
Advanced Design Studio: Provenance & Possibility
Alan Ricks, Abigail Chang
1021
Fall 2023
Architectural Design 3
Stella Betts, Sunil Bald, Peter de Bretteville, Martin Finio, Abigail Chang, Aniket Shahane, Lindsey Wikstrom