Nancy Cheng, RA, LEED AP
Associate Professor and Head, Department of Architecture, UO
Hi, I’m Nancy Cheng, Department Head and Associate Professor at the University of Oregon (UO). I’ve taught at UO for over 20 years, enjoying 2009-2014 as director of the UO Portland Architecture Program. I want to tell you about my mentors as I am eager to connect UO students to design professionals.
Do you remember someone who helped you along the way? They were part of your mentoring circle and I would like to encourage you to support our mentoring circle program.
As the daughter of immigrants who grew up in St. Louis, it helped me a lot to have great mentors. I was the shy middle sister who loved to read and draw, letting the older sister talk to adults. My parents came to the U.S. for graduate studies when there was a lot of political turmoil in China. With four kids, our family was always trying to save money, so I loved “How to Make Things from Scrap Materials” and I did a lot of sewing, printmaking and pottery as a teenager. I learned that you can envision a project done quickly, but every project requires overcoming stumbling blocks along the way (i.e. seam ripper). While my parents were in science and engineering, our ranch house had Danish lounge chairs and knockoffs of the Saarinen tulip dinette set. My brother and I went into architecture in part because a family friend, Mason Jen, was a successful architect for HOK who worked on the thin-shelled hyperboloid planetarium with Gyo Obata. Modernist sculptors like my teacher Erwin Hauer gave me love for sculpting surfaces.
How I got into teaching computational design was through one mentor after another. My boss, Gary Graham, bought one of the first Macs, and we were so excited to create really crude plan and elevation drawings with a Laserwriter. When I went to grad school, it was a huge opportunity to be taken under the wing of digital design expert William J. Mitchell (Bill), who later became dean of MIT. Originally from Australia, he came to Harvard after spending enough time in California to be on a different wavelength from the many of the Europeans running the school. He was a master at explaining complex ideas in simple English and conveying his excitement for the “bleeding edge” of technology. With the many international post-professional students he attracted, we had a little skunkworks for experimentation. Among the tutors he hired to teach emerging software, I was very excited to meet Erin Hoffer (later an Autodesk guru) who was my height (tallest of the Cheng sisters!) and with cropped straight black hair. But it didn’t matter what my mentors looked like, as they believed in me and provided me opportunities. Assisting Bill Mitchell and working with Jerzy Wojtowicz, a returning doctoral student with a mischievous wit, got me my first teaching job at the University of Hong Kong, where I learned that being the only native English speaker in the room is a great way to build self-confidence in public speaking. One mentor produced a network: Students of Bill (SOB’s) who teach around the world.
Connection during a time of crisis
A key challenge of the pandemic is how to strengthen social connection among our scattered community: we want to find ways to support each other better. Our classes will be remote, taught mainly through live videoconferencing with whiteboards, chat tools and online. Many of our students have had few professional opportunities due to the small architectural community in Eugene. We are concerned that the lockdown is furthering their isolation, especially for those from low-income and underrepresented communities.
Our department is eager to train students to be resilient, able to cope with a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. As I really feel my privilege during this time of wildfires, pandemic, racial violence and political strife, I will be focusing my Timber Tectonics studio on DIY shelter for the unhoused, incremental housing for microvillages. While incorporating the latest research on health, urbanism, building science and tectonics, our community is grappling with how to fully integrate spatial justice and anti-racist approaches into our teaching. Our students are eager to learn from you how to design projects that respond to diverse clients, reduce wildfires, protect watersheds and wildlife corridors and support ecologically sound transportation networks and material consumption systems. Our students must learn how to measure environmental impacts and inhabitant comfort in their design projects.
Can you help?
Students’ design abilities flourish when they are taken under the wing of an experienced architect. It’s not only the design advice, but also the invaluable encouragement when the students are emotionally drained.
Mentoring CirclesBecause a one-on-one situation creates a lot of pressure, we are pulling together participants to meet each other virtually in small, informal groups around common interests. Reps from AIA Oregon, Room for More, Design for Diversity and AIAS have worked with our UO team on this plan. We created the Mentoring Circles program in the hope that the small commitment of 3 to 4 meetings over 10 weeks can open up the opportunity to form ongoing relationships. Each group will be led by a professional (or two) who guides up to six mentees in a conversation about a topic of common interest. Mentors optionally attend an initial prep meeting October 1st and then we will start with a virtual kick-off event on October 8th, both at 5:30PM Pacific time. After that initial meeting, the small groups will meet at least two more times for about an hour (once in November and once in December), facilitated by the leading professional(s) and a student volunteer. The topics for each subsequent meeting can vary according to the interests and needs of the participants.
The intentions of this initiative are:
· To connect those at different stages of professional development
· To provide encouragement and mutual support
· To develop mentees' networking skills and professional contacts
· To create a setting in which professionals can gain fresh perspectives while sharing expertise
· To create more opportunities for professionals to recruit future staff
If you fill out this form, it will help us to match mentees with professionals.
SIGN ME UP: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6s5YGw9WiHa3oc5
Want to learn more? Join the Friday 9/18 AIA Oregon Virtual Happy Hour to discuss the Mentoring Circles program and chat about how your favorite mentor changed your life. Click here to register.
Hope that you can join us for these casual meetups and Help a Duck!
Best regards,
Nancy Cheng
