Evan Shieh is an architect, urbanist, researcher, and educator. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at New York Tech where he teaches as a full-time faculty member, and is also the director of Emergent Studio, a design and research office operating at architecture's intersection with urbanism, landscape, and infrastructure. He has practiced architecture and urban design professionally for over a decade in both the private and public sectors, and has also previously taught at a variety of other academic institutions including at the Parsons School of Design, the City College of New York, the University of Virginia, and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. As an emerging educator, he was recently awarded the 2023 Presidential Excellence in Teaching Award by New York Tech, and the national 2023 New Faculty Teaching Award by ACSA/AIAS, in recognition of demonstrated excellence and innovation in teaching performance during the formative years of an architectural teaching career.
Shieh’s interdisciplinary research investigates the urban and environmental crises that our mono-functional infrastructures and technologies are implicated in, with a particular focus on the spatial impact of mobility infrastructure and new mobility technologies on design, planning, and other key aspects of the built environment. He is the author of Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia (ORO Editions/AR+D Publishers, fall 2024), a forthcoming design-research book monograph that explores the latent and transformative impact automated vehicles will have on the future of cities. His research and design work have been curated and exhibited at venues around the world, including at the 2023 and 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture & Urbanism and the 2020 Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.
Shieh was trained as an architect and urban designer at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), from which he holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design with Distinction, and at the University of Southern California, from which he received a Bachelor of Architecture Cum Laude. He is the recipient of Harvard GSD's graduating Thesis Prize in Urban Design, the Prize for Academic Excellence in Urban Design, the Award for Excellence in Urban Design, and the Irving Innovation Fellowship Grant.
Prior to becoming a professor and founding his design studio Emergent, he contributed to a range and scale of diverse projects while working at various renowned design firms – including as an urban designer at Henning Larsen, as a project lead and architect at UNStudio, and as a researcher in New York City's Department of City Planning, amongst several others.
Courses Taught
- M.Arch. Program:
- ARCH 802: Design Studio 7
- B.Arch. Program:
- ARCH 502: Architectural Design VIII
- ARCH 501: Architectural Design VII
- ARCH 402: Architectural Design VI
- ARCH 401: Architectural Design V