Anchoring Conversations in Higher Education: Renée Cheng on Sources of Energy, Research, and Making Equitable Spaces
Renée Cheng is the Dean of the College of Built Environments at University of Washington. Previously, Dean Cheng was a professor, associate dean of research, and head of the school of architecture at the University of Minnesota. She also taught at University of Michigan and University of Arizona. She is a graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Harvard College. A licensed architect, her professional experience includes work for Pei, Cobb, Freed and Partners, and Richard Meier and Partners before founding Cheng-Olson Design. Dean Cheng has been honored twice as one of the top twenty-five most admired design educators by DesignIntelligence. Cheng is an advocate for equity in the field of architecture and recently led the research effort for the AIA guides for equitable practice in the workplace.
In her conversation with Amy Stone, Renée shares her unique career journey, shaped by family values and artistic influences, and her transition into the world of architecture, emphasizing the transformative impact of teaching and mentorship. Renée advises those starting out to examine how failures and disappointments can open doors and make end results stronger.
Tell me about your foundational years. What were your interests and what led you to architecture?
I did not grow up thinking I was going to be an architect. I am first-generation American born. My family relocated from China to the US during the time of the Japanese invasion. They really gave up everything, but they maintained their values about the importance of education. My mom was an artist and taught at the University of Michigan. I tagged along to classes which were full of people creating, drawing, and painting. I assumed the whole world was full of artists. Growing up, I loved making ceramics and paintings, but the direction for my education was laid out very clearly. The choices were law or medicine at either Harvard, Yale, or MIT.
I started in premed at Harvard and eventually transitioned to psychology and social relations. I felt really unhappy on the premed track and needed a break. I took a drawing class by William Reimann, who had been a pupil of Josef Albers. Reimann taught drawing from the point of view of perception, emphasizing hand-eye coordination and observation. I had never been formally taught to draw, but I had so much exposure from my mother who herself was extremely well trained in both Beaux Arts and Chinese traditions.
Seeing my love for the way Reimann taught drawing, my parents encouraged me to think about architecture. I didn't actually know that much about architecture. In applying for grad school, I had a portfolio that didn’t have much architectural design, but I ended up getting in everywhere I applied, which was the first time I thought, “They think I can be an architect, so maybe I can.”
What did you learn about yourself in studying architecture?
My first year at GSD was a complete shock. I entered with so little background compared to my classmates. I had so much to learn about history, theory, and drawing. I was doing my work in charcoal, while others were already masterful with pen and ink. I was feeling so disoriented that I almost dropped out of school.
The thing that saved me was that I ended up teaching with William Reimann, the professor who had opened my eyes to drawing. He took me on as a teaching fellow, which is essentially an apprentice teacher. I taught the whole time I was in grad school. It was my anchor. I developed an affinity for teaching and got addicted to helping students discover the “aha” moment. Teaching also helped me pay attention to the teaching styles of my professors and the experience fellow students had to offer.
Renee Cheng and Mignonette Yin Cheng in Rome, 1988. Photo by Eric Olson.
How did you get your start in working in architecture?
Looking back, my career can seem very linear and straightforward, but my experience felt very different from that. I started in New York at some large firms, then in a more unusual job, but I was fortunate to work on amazing projects. Over time though, I realized I was growing further and further from the things I wanted. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I probably was missing teaching. I actually took a year off from architecture entirely. I was doing ceramics at a pretty serious level.
That break helped me realize what I liked about architecture because I could see what I missed about it. In ceramics, you are throwing, tooling, and working through a process where there are things you can control and some things you can’t. I loved doing ceramics, but I missed the scale and spatial nature of architecture.
I went back and started working for Richard Meier. Shortly after, my husband, whom I had met at GSD, and I got an unexpected opportunity to start our own firm with a set of projects. Again, looking back on my career, things can sound very linear but at the time, it felt very random and unplanned. We actually at one point made a major life and career decision by throwing a dart. We didn’t know which opportunity was going to be the better path.
What inspired the transition from having your own firm to teaching?
While I was practicing, I started looking into teaching. At the time, though, our practice was very busy and also it had not matured enough to the point of having a predictable workflow to be able to take on the time commitment of teaching. Eventually, though, as projects were wrapping up, an opportunity came up to relocate and to teach at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
My first year of teaching at Michigan was also my mom’s last year as a UM professor. It was an extraordinary opportunity. I had been in the back of her classroom as a child, but this was the first time in my relationship as an adult that I was able to really discuss and understand her teaching. She was a great teacher. We’d have wonderful conversations: how do you get students to open up if they won't talk; how to be fair with your time between a student who's super talented and drawing so beautifully and another student that's really struggling. I went to her class and taught one- and two-point perspective and she came to my class and taught collage. We had an exhibit together of Cheng and Cheng in Italy where we were sketching the same scene side by side with different styles. We shared a mailbox and had offices down the hall from each other.
“It’s important to know where your sources of energy are. I recognize in myself that I’m a builder. For me, it’s putting together things that help synergies flourish or creating those ‘aha’ moments.”
What a unique opportunity! That’s beautiful.
I continued teaching and my husband was full-time with the practice. The scale of work at our practice was small, but my interests were in large-scale, complex, cutting-edge projects. I turned to that work for my research and found so many cases and opportunities to study and research.
Over time, I started applying for tenure track positions. An offer came from the University of Arizona. I remember visiting and feeling like the landscape, culture, and setting was so different from anything we had lived in. But we decided to give it a try and we ended up staying, building a house, and starting our family there. As I was up for tenure, University of Minnesota – which was a place we had been looking at seriously for some time – also extended a tenure position. I accepted and we relocated with our toddler and newborn.
I was at the school for seventeen years, which gave me the opportunity to build up new programs during my time in various roles. I moved from administrative coordination to department-wide work and was then the Head of the School. I’m proud to have started the Master of Science Consortium for Research Practices. That program encouraged students that come from underrepresented backgrounds to join the cohort. Seventy to eighty percent were women and/or people of color. They were being mentored into these research roles and I was really excited about the prospect of these students going onto firms and shifting the culture to be more research oriented.
Your research and the program of University of Minnesota is very known for its focus on equity, which is so crucial. How did that focus become important for you?
I came at it very much from the point of view that included disciplinary difference and not only gender, racial, ethnicity differences. Initially, my research focus was on how teams were having miscommunications and issues working together because they simply didn't understand what the agendas were, or the language people were using. That had a lot of parallels to misunderstandings and conflicts that arise across racial or gender differences.
I was approaching it from disciplinary culture, which for a lot of professionals is more accessible because it is not as challenging to their core identities, or especially racial identities. Working across cultures has become more and more a part of my work. When I came here to the University of Washington, I brought that with me. Even before I came, I was hearing a lot from students and faculty about where they were with discussions around equity. I was able to bring in the tools and analysis that I had seen work. I felt like that was the right time to start those discussions.
Renée leading a sketching session in Rome. Photo by Madison Frederick.
Looking back at it all, what have been your biggest challenges.
For me, it’s been keeping up one's energy. It’s important to know where your sources of energy are. I recognize in myself that I'm a builder. For me, it's putting together things that help synergies flourish or creating those ‘aha’ moments. I actually get more drained by things once they're built and I’m just managing them. It’s been key for me to know when the building stage has progressed and passed on to a phase of refinement and maintenance. I can look to build the next thing while also keeping in touch and nourishing past projects from afar.
I also know that I do need alone time. If I have too much public involvement, I also need time to recharge, whether it's in a library or on a walk. I found it’s important to be sensitive to knowing when your energy levels are not being fed, and then knowing how to rearrange and recharge.
“I can look back on things that, at the time, felt like a crushing dead end, but with time and perspective, I can see where things didn’t work – those failures or disappointments – actually opened up other doors or made the end result stronger.”
How do you manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
I can look back on things that, at the time, felt like a crushing dead end, but with time and perspective, I can see where things didn't work – those failures or disappointments – actually opened up other doors or made the end result stronger. For example, outcomes are almost always better after opposition from faculty because pushback brought additional cycles of input and improvement.
With perspective, I recognize that things that are disappointing in the moment usually have a lesson or something to teach. When COVID hit, there was so much I had planned and had going for the college. Everything just came to a complete stop. I needed to rethink the timelines and change processes and reconsider the kinds of initiatives we were working on. It was a big rethink.
I can look back and say now that our college’s strategic plan is stronger for the fact that it took three times longer. The space planning that I wanted to get done early is way more interesting now because we know more about remote work and learning. It cracked open the potential for different types of classrooms and different kinds of meeting spaces and hybrid opportunities. The result now is that much richer than if we had just gone according to schedule.
What have you learned in the last six months?
When plans were disrupted with COVID, we had the opportunity to ask questions and rethink student access, equity, wellness, and belonging. We began translating those questions to our physical spaces. Are our spaces supporting those things or detracting from that?
Our campus is composed of older buildings from different eras. Many have both enormous architectural value and a huge carbon footprint. We're not going to destroy those buildings, but we have to recognize they were designed in a different era to meet the needs of students that came in, went to class, and went home where they lived nearby campus. Our current student demographic is different. The cost of living has risen. They're commuting from farther away. We're asking them to do more collaboration. They're working more on research questions with faculty. These buildings don’t support that work and so it's taking place in hallways and ad-hoc spaces. Who gets access to windows and ventilation? Those who most need natural daylight and ventilation may not be the ones who are receiving it. Do we want to change that? What does that mean?
Academia can be ironic. In many ways, we are completely democratic and treat freedom of speech as primary, but at the other times, we're completely hierarchical with trappings of power evident in things like tenure compared to non-tenured, and who has a voice. We have to look at our spaces and our beautiful campuses and figure out how to collaboratively reshape them for a more equitable, accessible model.
My last six months have been this great project and working closely with KieranTimberlake, who has been wonderful. We engaged them knowing that we wanted to be grounded in our communities and engaging very different stakeholder perspectives. I'm super excited by the things we're finding. A lot of people are struggling with making equitable spaces, measuring that, and making changes to their physical environments. It has been exciting to think of the spatial issues that we can as architects make a difference on.
Renée speaking at University of Washington Commencement. Photo courtesy of University of Washington.
What are you most excited about right now?
I’m very excited about this current project and research. It’s asking the right kinds of questions and anchoring the conversation in spaces of higher education. We are so attached to traditions and cultural norms that need to be questioned and rethought.
We participate in literally making our values and beliefs into tangible physical space. We shape behavior with architecture and spaces. We know that architecture and how we teach it can elevate the human spirit. We also know we can diminish, exclude, or limit. We need to be questioning things at both the pedagogical level as well as the physical level.