Lily Chi

Lily Chi’s work and teaching in architectural design, theory, and criticism explores the sites and siting of building projects. She is interested in how discursive contexts, which architecture shares with other disciplines and practices, illuminate the broader stakes in a work of building — its questions, aspirations and untapped potentials, but also tacit agendas, blind spots and consequences unseen. She is also interested in how building work in all its scales — written, drawn, or built — inflects contexts in opening sites for seeing, thing, and making. This analytical focus informs her writings on the vocabulary of architectural ‘use’; on the evolution of the modern idea of architectural expression; on filmic and literary spatial construction, including a Graham Foundation supported study of tourism, war and city-building in 20th-century Saigon.

Her research on incremental housing design forms part of a current project on the agency of built space and form, beginning with post-war efforts to understand and counter the repressive effects of industrial capitalism and mass media. This inquiry informs her co-edited books Building and Unbuilding the City Museum: From Le Corbusier to Ahmedabad (2026), and Seeding Urban Transformation (2026). Chi holds a B.Arch. from Carleton University, and an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in architectural theory and history from Cambridge and McGill Universities, respectively.