New hire Ann Lui poised to shape architecture studies at UChicago

Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts brings nationally recognized design practice, adding her interdisciplinary vision to Art History Department

This Autumn, architect, designer, and educator Ann Lui will take up her post as Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts and Director of Undergraduate Architectural Studies. Lui brings a distinctive combination of trade expertise, historical grounding, and civic engagement to the Department of Art History’s growing architectural studies program.

Lui is a founding partner of Future Firm, an award-winning Chicago architecture and design practice whose projects span cultural institutions, workforce development programs, public facilities, and community-centered initiatives across the city. Lui’s own scholarship examines the social, political, and technical systems that shape built environments. Through investigation into housing policy and building codes, she tackles questions of accessibility, public space, and urban transformation.

The Art History Department has steadily expanded its architectural offerings over the last decade. Since the launch of an architectural studies minor in 2015, Art History has been cultivating a curriculum that combines history, theory, and studio practice, furnishing students with rich outlets to engage architecture as a historical subject and a creative discipline. 

For Department Chair Megan Sullivan, this combination is the defining factor of UChicago’s approach to the field. 

 “Architecture is, by its nature, interdisciplinary,” Sullivan said. “At the heart of our program is the idea that architectural history and architectural practice are mutually informing. Our curriculum is designed to accommodate a wide range of questions and approaches, from formally and artistically oriented ones to those deeply engaged with social and environmental problems.”

While many architecture programs are housed in professional schools, UChicago’s curriculum is rooted in the liberal arts. Students are encouraged to combine coursework in architectural history and research design with studies across the humanities and arts, as well as social sciences and physical sciences. Art History is intent on training what Sullivan calls “nimble and broad thinkers” capable of approaching architecture across social, political, formal, environmental, and technological perspectives.

The department is working to establish an architecture major that would build on the strengths and momentum of the minor, while deepening opportunities for students focused on built environments. As curricular conversations continue, Lui’s arrival marks an important step in the program’s evolution. 

We spoke with Lui, already well settled into campus, about architectural education, Future Firm’s work in the South Side, and what excites her about her first quarter at the University.

Q&A with Ann Lui

How do you envision your new role in architectural studies contributing to intellectual life in Art History?

I’m a practicing architect, but I was also trained as an architectural historian. My own work focuses on examining the history of practice in the United States through things that usually are taken for granted or overlooked as office minutiae: building codes, building violations, the history of licensure, modes of project delivery. How do these topics intersect with the broader social and economic conditions in which they emerged?

For me, practice, research, and teaching are different ways of approaching the same issues. In architectural practice, we thread a needle through restrictions based on budget, regulation, and constructability to try to create something that feels effortless, functional, and memorable. Research gives us the critical distance to ask about the origins and conditions of those restrictions—and speculate how they might change in the future. Teaching is a collaborative process in which students become part of those conversations and produce new knowledge, new modes of working, new conditions in the built environment. 

People have joked with me, as an incoming professor of practice, that at the University of Chicago people say: “It works in practice, but does it work in theory?” I am so excited to work with students as they develop both their technical and creative thinking around architecture, as well as situate that thinking in what they can learn through art history, the Core, and the University as a whole. 

Your courses connect architectural design to public life and civic engagement—a direct reflection of your personal practice. What kinds of questions do you want students to ask about the built environment?

In teaching, I always try to help students connect learning about design with the stakes and impacts of the design process itself.

For example, a common technical drawing for architects is the wall section: a detailed diagram which describes to the builder what goes into a wall, such as structure, insulation, siding, etc. But when you start looking closely, that one wall contains all kinds of other histories and questions embedded within: the establishment of property lines, the history of urban fires, questions of material life-cycle, and transformations in climate. 

I bring this relationship into the classroom by grounding abstract ideas in current conditions, active projects or case studies (which in design we call “precedents”). For example, in my building code class, students begin by studying the history of a certain code provision or zoning ordinance, then explore how it shapes buildings that they can visit today, and speculate how the policy might catalyze future change. Architecture is not only the design of buildings, but also the study of the social, legal, technological, and environmental systems that produce them.

This fall, I’ll be teaching a class on building code and advocacy focused on policy proposals associated with the “abundant housing” movement, which seeks to address the housing shortage through policy-scale changes to the development environment. Many of the code and policy changes are highly technical, and students will learn directly from design professionals as well as activists and legislators who are fighting to end the housing crisis. As a final project, students will deliver short speeches during the public comment period of a Chicago City Council meeting. It’s a way of introducing them to civic engagement while, in a sense, bringing the city’s elected officials into the classroom. 

Future Firm’s projects range from cultural institutions to workforce development and public infrastructure. How does that work shape what you bring to the Art History Department?

Future Firm is an eleven-person architecture and design research firm. We work with mission-driven clients, including non-profits, small businesses, and public agencies, with a certain focus on arts and culture projects.

We recently completed Revolution Workshop, a headquarters for a workforce development organization in Chicago’s West side that provides free pre-apprenticeship training for people entering the construction industry. The project just received the Exemplary Non-Profit Development Award from the Local Initiatives Support Cooperation (LISC), and we are super proud that. Alongside what we think is a great design, the project was delivered with a project team that was 95-percent M/WBE, reflecting our organization’s commitment to diversifying the construction workforce. 

Future Firm is deeply committed to Chicago’s South Side. We’ve completed projects in Bronzeville, Hyde Park, and South Shore. Currently, the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC) is under construction for a renovation and 10,000 square-foot expansion to the nation’s oldest continuously operating center for Black visual art. The project will add exhibition space, museum-grade archives, classrooms, and community gathering areas.

What excites me is the chance to engage students with this project directly. That might mean visiting an active construction site; engaging SSCAC’s meaningful and rare archives, which will be more accessible after the project completes; or participating in SSCAC’s future arts programming. Practice creates entry points for students to see how architectural ideas move from research and design into the world.

What makes a liberal-arts approach to architectural studies distinctive, and what excites you about the future of the program at UChicago?

Architectural practice is changing rapidly. Advances in AI, material science, and building technology are transforming how we design, construct, and inhabit buildings. At the same time, cultural, ecological, and economic pressures are reshaping what we expect architecture to do. 

At the University of Chicago, we have an opportunity to educate students for the future of architecture, training them for careers that will likely be unrecognizable to practitioners today. I am excited by the possibility of preparing not only future architects, but also policymakers, academics, developers, builders, and others who will combine design thinking with critical inquiry and approach complex problems through multiple disciplinary perspectives.

One of the strengths of a liberal-arts approach is that it encourages students to connect these broader perspectives with practical knowledge, iterative design process, and habits of mind needed to communicate and translate ideas into brick-and-mortar (or any material of choice). Even something fairly technical as the design of a bathroom requires sustained reflection about culture and politics, ecology and infrastructure, accessibility and labor, economics and public policy.

Architecture education, at its best, creates a way of seeing the world that acknowledges that everything which is designed, from a doorknob to a zoning ordinance, can also be redesigned. Rather than dictating to students that “this is how it is done,” we can ask them why it is done that way and how it might be done better. By conducting architectural studies in the Arts & Humanities Division, we challenge students to “fill in the blanks” about the transformations they want to experience and to help them build the tools to enact that change. 

The University of Chicago is uniquely positioned for that kind of inquiry. Students here can engage architecture alongside scholars working in soil contamination, to economic policy, to planetary urbanization, to visual culture, and countless other fields. They can study architecture both as a historical subject and a creative practice, while developing ways of thinking and practice that will challenge and expand the discipline of architecture.