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Join us for a conversation with Poyao Shih, designer, educator, and founder of POSITION Studio, as he reflects on a career moving between the extremes of design scale. From the headquarters of Quarra Stone and Mission Rock Block B at WORKac, where questions of infrastructure and urban systems dominated, to contributions to installations for Höweler + Yoon and Sarah Sze during his time at Quarra, and later collaborations with artists Kate Williams and Hannah Evans through POSITION Studio, alongside the award-winning X-Site Pavilion in Taipei—Poyao’s work demonstrates how design intelligence shifts across vastly different contexts.
Drawing from both professional and academic projects, Poyao explores how lessons learned at one scale can be applied to another—how the thinking behind large-scale frameworks can inform the intimacy of interiors and installations, and how the precision of detail-making can strengthen approaches to urban complexity. This lecture invites reflection on what it means to continually “scale up, scale down,” and to use design as the driving tool across every dimension of practice.
Speakers: Poyao Shih, founder of POSITION Studio, Visiting Assistant Professor of Pratt SOA
Moderator: Hao-Yeh Lu, Co-Chair of ENYA
Poyao Shih is the founder of POSITION, based in Brooklyn, New York. He is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program and a faculty researcher at the Center for Climate Adaptation. Poyao holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) (2016) and a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design(2019).
Since 2011, Poyao has worked for various offices worldwide, including Kengo Kuma and Associates, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Morphosis, and WORKac. Before founding POSITION, he was the design project lead at Quarra’s Digital Fabrication Lab. While at Quarra, Poyao expanded his expertise in digital fabrication and collaborated on complex projects with renowned artists and architects such as Höweler & Yoon, Maya Lin, and Sarah Sze. Additionally, as the design coordinator for Quarra’s new headquarters project, he was deeply involved in the design process with Snøhetta on a large-scale industrial campus.
In academia, Poyao has served as a research assistant at Harvard GSD and a lab manager at SCI-Arc Shanghai. He has lectured in several workshops in Taiwan and has been a guest critic at Columbia GSAPP, UW SARUP, Pratt, Parsons, NCKU, and Chung Yuan University. His academic work and articles have been widely published in Suckerpunch Daily, Archidog, the International Exhibition of Architecture Graduation Design, Taiwan Architecture, and Taiwan Architect Magazine.
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AIANY Emerging New York Architects Committee
