Sep 15, 2019

Rice Architecture welcomes three new faculty members this fall. Viola Ago and Amelyn Ng have been named the 2019-2021 Wortham Fellows, and Brittany Utting joins Rice Architecture as a Visiting Studio Instructor. Following the completion of his Wortham Fellowship, Ajay Manthripragada has been named the Harry K. and Albert K. Smith Visiting Critic.

 

Viola Ago - 2019 Wortham Fellow

Prior to coming to Rice, Viola Ago most recently held the Christos Yessios Visiting Professorship at the Knowlton School of Architecture at OSU and the William Muschenheim Design Fellowship position at the Taubman College of Architecture, University of Michigan.  Viola also directs MIRACLES Architecture.

Viola has previously taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Architecture, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She earned her Master of Architecture degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Architectural Science from Ryerson University in Toronto. Prior to teaching, Viola worked as a lead designer in the Advanced Technology Team at Morphosis Architects in Los Angeles.
 

Amelyn Ng - 2019 Wortham Fellow

Amelyn Ng is an Australian architect, writer, and cartoonist. Her Fellowship research looks at issues in graphics, epistemology, and theories of information-richness in architecture. Her work aims to expand discourse on architectural images in historical, material and humorous registers.

Amelyn holds a Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices (CCCP) at Columbia GSAPP, and a Master of Architecture and a Bachelor of Environments from Melbourne University. She has been an invited guest critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, Texas A&M, and Melbourne University. Prior to coming to Rice, she worked for Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, the Avery Review, VOLUME and Performa, and co-organized public forums on art and architecture such as Works in Progress in New York and PROCESS in Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in Avery Shorts, VOLUME, MONU, Critical Planning Journal and Assemble Papers, with forthcoming work in PLAT and e-flux Architecture.

 

Brittany Utting - 2019 Visiting Studio Instructor

Brittany Utting is an architect and educator whose work explores how our built environment overlays with economies of labor, leisure, and production. She previously taught at the University of Michigan where she was the 2017-2018 Willard A. Oberdick Fellow. Brittany received her Master of Architecture from Yale University and a B.S. in Architecture Summa Cum Laude from the Georgia Institute of Technology where she graduated as Presidential Scholar. She is a member of the editorial board of CARTHA Magazine and has worked at Log, Journal for Architecture. Brittany is a licensed architect in New York and has practiced at Thomas Phifer and Partners where she was the project designer for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In 2017, she founded the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE with Daniel Jacobs.

 

Ajay Manthripragada - Harry K. and Albert K. Smith Visiting Critic

Prior to coming to Rice as a 2017-2019 Wortham Fellow, Ajay Manthripragada taught at UC Berkeley from 2010 to 2017. He has also taught at California College of the Arts and Rhode Island School of Design. Manthripragada founded his own studio in 2014 and has completed several small buildings since its inception. The practice focuses on the relational qualities of form as a geometric, political and material project. Manthripragada's work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and the School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from UC Berkeley and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. In 2018, he was nominated for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize as an emerging practitioner.   

 

 

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