New faculty members

Rice Architecture is pleased to announce the appointment of two new tenure-track faculty members, Shantel Blakely and Maggie Tsang, who will join the school in Fall 2022 as assistant professors.

“We are delighted to welcome Shantel Blakely and Maggie Tsang to our community of scholars and practitioners here in MD Anderson Hall,” said Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice Architecture. “They are both focused on the close reading of buildings and spaces around buildings, examining how the big issues of today could be illuminated by the timeless lessons of the past and the future agency of architecture as an optimistic, propositional discipline. Their research operates on multiple scales and cultures—both here in Houston and globally—expanding our efforts to engage architecture as a truly generalist, multicultural discipline.” 

Shantel Blakely is an architect and architectural historian with strong interests in architecture and philosophy. Her scholarship focuses on forms of monumentality and configuration that have motivated architects since antiquity, bringing to light aesthetic values that might be traces of transient cultural moments or architects’ responses to imperatives from outside the discipline. A recipient of the Getty Institute and Graham Foundation grants, she is currently working on a book Appartamento Aperto: At Home with Marco Zanuso (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2024)—examining the architect’s modular buildings and mass-produced furniture in Europe and Latin America as they engaged both local conditions and global economic, artistic and design trends. She is also working on a monograph on the African American architect Charles E. Fleming, who started his career in the 1960s in St. Louis, cannily navigating the political turmoil of the era—including racial segregation, violence and economic disparities—to build a wide array of works and partnerships. Blakely comes to Houston from Washington University in St. Louis where she has been teaching courses in architectural history, theory and design. Previously, she taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, and Parsons School of Design, and worked at Roger Hirsch Architects and Maryann Thompson Architects. She also served as the public programs manager at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she organized lectures and conferences and co-curated the exhibition Happening Now: Historiography in the Making (2016). Her essays and translations have been published in AA Files, Avery Review, PLOT, Log, and other journals. Blakely holds a Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture from Columbia University, MArch from Princeton University, MA in Philosophy from Tufts University and AB from Harvard University.

Maggie Tsang is an architect and urbanist, with a broad spectrum of expertise across multiple scales and disciplines, examining the relationship between nature and the city. She is currently the Wortham Fellow at Rice Architecture where her teaching and research focuses on issues of climate adaptation, floodplain urbanism, community resilience, and the relationship between city and nature. These topics also resonate in her practice Dept., co-founded with Isaac Stein, which was recently awarded the Architecture League of New York Prize. Together with Philip Bedient, chair of Rice University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Elizabeth Roberto, assistant professor of sociology, Tsang is the recipient of the Rice University’s Sustainable Futures Grant focused on flood mitigation strategies for Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood that are based on nimble urban design principles and nature-based solutions. Prior to founding Dept., she worked as an urban designer and planner at Utile in Boston, MA where she managed a variety of projects including zoning codes, streetscape design, development test-fits, comprehensive plans, neighborhood plans, and public space activation. Previously, she also worked as design lead at WORK Architecture Company in New York where she led several public projects, including two school additions for Edible Schoolyard and the New York School Construction Authority. Tsang received her BA and MArch from Yale University, and Master of Design Studies in Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is a registered architect in Maryland and Texas.