Communicative Construction

Edward Ford

Edward Ford is the author of the two volumes of The Details of Modern Architecture and The Architectural Detail. His articles have appeared in Architectural Design, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Detail, and Harvard Design Magazine. His fifth book, Searching for Authenticity: Rustic Architecture in America 1877-1940, will be published in Spring 2025. Ford was a consultant for the 1992 American Heritage Dictionary and is on the Editorial Board of Architectural Graphic Standards. His architectural work is the subject of Five Houses, Ten Details and has been featured in arq: Architectural Research Quarterly and The New American House. He has taught at Washington University, the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Virginia and the University of Arkansas.

Esra Şahin Burat

Esra Şahin Burat holds the position of Associate Professor at the Architectural Internationalization Demonstration School in Southeast University in Nanjing, China, concurrently serving as the vice director of the Asian Architectural Archive Center. She received her BArch from Middle East Technical University, MArch from Virginia Tech and her PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. She previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Mersin University. She is a recipient of the SOM Foundation’s Travel Fellowship and the ACSA Steel Design Award for Excellence. As a registered architect she designed urban renewal projects and supervised architectural survey teams in the archaeological sites of Cilicia in Turkey. Her current research centres on the anthropology of habitation in ancient and modern architecture.

Shi Yonggao

Shi Yonggao is a Professor at the School of Architecture, Southeast University in Nanjing, China. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and 2023 and an adjunct associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012. He received both his BArch and PhD from Southeast University. Among his publications are The Presence of Material (2008) and Architectural Theory and Design: Tectonics (2021). He co-authored Fundamentals of Architectural Design (2016) and translated Surface Architecture (2018) into Chinese. As editorial board member of several leading architectural journals, he guest-edited “Legibility: The Meanings of Construction and the Construction of Meaning” in Architectural Journal (12/2021) and “Machine and Architecture” in New Architecture (06/2021).

Michael U Hensel

Michael U Hensel is an architect, a founding member of the pioneering practice OCEAN and partner in OCEAN Architecture | Environment. He is editor of the book series Designing Environments (Springer Nature) and associate editor of Intelligent Buildings International. He is university professor at TU Wien, where he leads the department for Digital Architecture and Planning. He has taught at renowned institutions worldwide, including the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design – where he directed the Research Centre for Architecture and Tectonics – the Technical University Munich, Rice University in Houston, University of Technology Sydney and Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Defne Sunguroğlu Hensel

Defne Sunguroğlu Hensel is an architect and partner in OCEAN Architecture | Environment. She is editor of the book series Designing Environments (Springer Nature) and is currently Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Landscape Architecture at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. Previously she taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Technical University Munich and TU Wien.

Yung Ho Chang

Yung Ho Chang founded the Atelier FCJZ in Beijing, China with Lijia Lu in 1993 and has served as principal architect ever since. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) and Emeritus Professor at MIT. Chang has won a number of prizes, including the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. Between 2005 and 2010, he headed the Architecture Department at MIT. He was also a Pritzker Prize Jury member from 2011 to 2017.

Franca Trubiano

Franca Trubiano is Graduate Group Chair of the PhD Program in Architecture, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Registered Architect with the Ordre des architectes du Québec. She is also co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Mellon-funded, Humanities+Urbanism+Design Initiative. Trubiano is author of Building Theories: Architecture as the Art of Building (Routledge 2023) and the forthcoming co-edited book BIO/MATTER/TECHNO/SYNTHETICS: Design for the More Than Human (ACTAR 2023). Trubiano also co-edited Women [Re]Build; Stories, Polemics, Futures (ORO - ar+d, 2019) and edited Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge 2012), which was translated into Korean and awarded the 2015 Sejong Outstanding Scholarly Book Award.

Ute Christina Groba

Ute Christina Groba is an architect, researcher and assistant professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) with a special interest in wooden building materials and in user-centred design approaches. Groba studied architecture at RWTH Aachen in Germany (Dipl Ing. 2005) and at ETSAM in Spain and holds a PhD from AHO (2021). She has worked as an architect in Germany at kadawittfeldarchitektur and in Norway at Helen&Hard and has taught at universities in both countries. Groba’s doctoral dissertation Timber Tales is a qualitative study that addresses how architects and residents employ, experience and value wooden building materials in housing projects, arguing that buildings that are loved last longer and thus contribute to both ecological and social sustainability.

Hua Li

The Founder and Principal Architect of Trace Architecture Office (TAO), Hua Li received his MArch from Tsinghua University and Yale University. He has won several important architectural awards including Design Vanguard 2012, GDGB China Awards by Architectural Record, Young Architect Award of 2012, China Architecture Media Awards, ARCASIA Awards for Architecture, WA Awards, shortlisted in Aga Kahn Award 2013 and was nominated in BSI Swiss Architectural Award in 2016 and 2018. His works have been exhibited internationally, including at the 2018 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. He has also taught at Tsinghua University, China Central Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Hong Kong as an adjunct professor.

Zhu Jingxiang

Zhu Jingxiang is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He received architectural training from Southeast University in Nanjing and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He joined the School of Architecture of CUHK in 2004 and now focuses on new spatial structures, light building systems and sustainable building technologies. Since 2008, his team has invented six building systems that have been successfully applied in more than 13 Chinese provinces, Kenya, the Philippines and the Caribbean. By demonstrating new inclusive development, he has won a series of awards and has been recognised as the only architectural case of the Impact Story of CUHK in the recent Research Assessment Scheme.

Gao Shichao

Gao Shichao is a PhD candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the work of architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni, the masonry innovation and the envelope design. He is interested in integrating data methodologies and databases into architectural studies. He graduated from Politecnico di Milano in 2017 with a master’s degree and worked at an architectural practice in Shenzhen from 2018–2020. He has contributed to project design such as National Embassy in India and the Shenzhen Sports Centre.

David Leatherbarrow

David Leatherbarrow is Emeritus Professor of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania and Foreign Dean, Southeast University in Nanjing, China. Born in 1953 in the United States and educated in the US and England, he has lectured throughout the world and held guest professorships in Britain, Denmark and China. Questions of how architecture appears, is perceived and shapes topography direct his research. Among his twelve books are Projecting Urbanity: architecture for and against the city (2023), Book of Ruins, with John Hunt (2022), Building Time: architecture, event, and experience (2020), Three Cultural Ecologies, with Richard Wesley (2018), Architecture Oriented Otherwise (2009), Topographical Stories (2004), Uncommon Ground (2000) and two books co-authored with Mohsen Mostafavi: Surface Architecture (2002) and On Weathering (1993). In 2020 he was awarded the Topaz Medallion, the highest award given by the American Institute of Architects and Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture for excellence in architectural education.