Sophie Weston Chien is a designer-organizer.
She builds liberated spaces and communities through social and ecological design. This means altering power in society through the built environment and designing resilient relationships with care. Her interdisciplinary practice takes the form of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, writing, textile art, graphic design, and teaching and organizing within the design field.
She is one-half of the collaboration just practice and co-founder of Seeding Pedagogies Collaborative. Sophie is a core organizer of the Design As Protest Collective, active in Dark Matter U, and on the Board of Directors at DesignxRI. Sophie is based on Massachusett and Pawtucket land (Cambridge, Massachusetts).
Sophie has been published in Log, PAIRS, DISC, Harvard Urban Review, Paprika!, Architect Magazine, Portals: Pedagogy, Practice, and Architecture’s Future Imaginary (Actar), spoken at Harvard, University of Waterloo, RISD, University of Tennessee, and on the podcast Clever. She has exhibited at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Boston Public Library, Harvard, MIT, Yale, RISD, Brown, Mississippi State, and completed residencies at I-Park and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Recently, Sophie taught a J-Term class at Harvard called Apocalypse Now and served as a Teaching Fellow at RISD Architecture. Sophie has worked for National Park Service in Nome, Agency Landscape + Planning in Cambridge, Oualalou + Choi in Paris, LA-Màs in Los Angeles, and the Biden/Harris Campaign in Charlotte. Sophie is pursuing a dual Masters in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design as a Dean’s Merit Scholar. She has a BFA/Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design with a minor in Politics and Policy and served as Student Body President, AIA Diversity Advancement Scholar, and Maharam Fellow.
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++ reach me at sophiewchien@gmail.com, view my cv here
friends + collaborators: Amanda Ugorji, Catherine Park, Emma Werowinski, Jasmine Gutbrod, Laurence von Lignau, Patrick Hulse, Sahil Mohan, SeungWook Tommy Maing, Will Zhang, Austin Sun, Bz Zhang, christin hu, Emily Wettstein, Kira Schnitzler, Deborah Tsogbe, Raphaele Tayvah, Deena Darby
featured articles/news/press
2023 - Architect Magazine: The Dark Matter Issue
2023 - ENSPIRE Magazine on Soft City Pop Up
2022 - Architect’s Newspaper on Dark Matter U at Lisbon Architecture Triennale
2022 - Madame Architect’s Next Gen Feature
2022 - Boston University on Soft City at MIT Rotch Gallery
2021 - RISD Class of 2020 Commencement Speaker
2020 - Hyperallergic RISD Senior Show Coverage
2020 - e-flux RISD Senior Show Coverage
2020 - RISD Graduation Award
2020 - Architect’s Foundation Grad Series
2020 - Clever Podcast #107: Creativity is Core
2020 - RISD Architecture Senior Show Organizer
2019 - RISD Fall River Studio Coverage
2019 - DesignxRI Keynote Panel
2019 - Newman Civic Fellow Announcement
2018 - Brown Daily Herald Campus Politics Coverage
2018 - RISD North Hall Groundbreaking
2017 - Maraham Fellow Blog