Lauren McQuistion, Architecture

Name:

Lauren McQuistion

Title:

Assistant Professor

Department:

Architecture

Describe your research in about 200 words.

I am a designer, educator, and researcher whose work focuses on the built environment. My scholarship examines the spatial history of museum institutions and their role in shaping cultural identity through the visual and spatial regimes of art and architecture in the 20th and 21st centuries. My research has been supported by Columbia GSAPP’s Buell Center, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Southeast Chapter of SAH, and the Constructed Environment Research Network. My research informs my teaching, which emphasizes place-based learning and critical interpretations of sites as layered records of socio-environmental conditions. I teach design and theory courses that explore architectural history, typology, and temporality, with particular expertise in 20th/21st-century architecture. I hold a B.S. in Architecture with a minor in Architectural History from the University of Virginia and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. I am currently completing my PhD in the Constructed Environment at UVA, where my dissertation, Between Idea and Building: Art, Architecture, and Identity in the Whitney Museum of American Art, explores the museum’s architectural evolution. I also have worked professionally as an architectural designer in Washington, D.C., Charlottesville, and Detroit, experiences that continue to inform my academic practice.

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

Design students consistently teach and reteach me to look at the built environment, its past and its potentials, with fresh eyes.