PROFILE
Dana Cuff engages architecture and the city as cultural production. As Director of AUD's think tank, cityLAB, Cuff brings a vital discourse to UCLA about contemporary urban design along with a series of design-research projects that engage both students and faculty. She publishes and lectures widely on issues concerning the postsuburban condition, the architectural profession, affordable housing, urban sensing, and the politics of place. She recently edited Fast Forward Urbanism (with R. Sherman, Princeton Architectural Press), and is author of The Provisional City and Architecture: The Story of Practice (both MIT Press). Cuff's current research explores the nature of "public architecture" today, emergent pervasive computing technologies, design opportunities leveraged from infrastructure, and infill housing. In 2006 she founded cityLAB to explore the challenges facing the contemporary metropolis. Since then, the lab has grown in scope, stature, and public awareness: cityLAB was invited to exhibit at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, was featured on CNN and in Newsweek Magazine, and was named one of the top four urban think tanks in the country by Architect Magazine in 2009. Among their projects is Backyard Homes, an investigation into doubling the capacity of single-family lots in Los Angeles, and WPA 2.0, a competition that generated innovative, implementable proposals to place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery. cityLAB also engages in funded research supported by a variety of sources, to study the urban implications of high speed rail, the role of design in urban revitalization (most recently in Westwood Village adjacent to the UCLA campus), and pervasive computing as social media.
Image credits from left to right:
Position 1) Accredit 14-12..: Rx for the R1, Backyard Homes project
Position 2) FFU_Cover: Cuff and Sherman, Editors. Fast-Forward Urbanism. Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
Position 3) VB10_Dahl...: cityLAB installation at 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, American Pavilion
Postiion 4) Blast 1...: WPA2.0: Working Public Architecture, cityLAB's international design competition
Position 5) Cuff_CNN: Cuff on CNN International, Future of Cities series
Position 6) DSC 4353: Cuff leads cityLAB's workshop on Westwood Village Visions
EDUCATION
Ph.D., Architecture, UC Berkeley
B.A., Psychology and Design, UC Santa Cruz
STUDIO
cityLAB
AWARDS
2004 Lise Meitner Endowed Chair at Lund University in Sweden
2004-2006 Fellow of the Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA
